Method Underscores? (and a 'solution')

[has]

aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) wrote in message news:<1gm1um6.zgqbbe8x559fN%aleaxit at yahoo.com>...
> Jeremy Bowers <jerf at jerf.org> wrote:
> > I'm thinking I'll stick with Python.
> 
> Me, too.  But I understand how the "antiperl" (lrep?-) nearly
> punctuation free style of Applescript may be tempting -- if Applescript
> were cross-platform, it might perhaps make an even better beginners'
> language than Python (and I think that of few languages). 

Ahhhhh, don't say that!

While AppleScript code can be wonderfully readable even to folk with
absolutely no knowledge of the language, it's often an absolute swine
to write - stripping out all the punctuation and allowing applications
and osaxen (extensions) to add their own arbitrary keywords leaves the
language semantics appallingly ambiguous and confused.

The right approach, imo, would be to design a very conventional
scripting language, perhaps using a S-expression based [non-]syntax
that's easy to manipulate programmatically, and leave all the fancy
syntax, visual effects, beginner-friendly dumbing down, etc. to the
editing tools, which are much better placed to know what's really what
than any dumb text-based source code can ever be. Still a major
undertaking, but a better chance of pulling it off than.


> It doesn't scale up as well as Python, though, it appears to me.

Heh, more like AppleScript doesn't scale *at all*. :p

has