Hypercard in Squeak?

Lawson English english at primenet.com
Sun May 28 10:03:47 UTC 2000


On Fri, May 26, 2000 12:13 PM, Alan Kay <mailto:Alan.Kay at disney.com> wrote:
>Dave --
>
>We want something more like "Hypercard 2000" or "what Hypercard should
have
>been".
>
>Hypercard had some nifty ideas (and quite a few of them are lurking in
>Morphic Squeak -- for example, have you noticed that the center menu of a
>bookmorph allows you to search for any string fragment on all of the pages
>of the bookmorph? -- that a bookmorph can be sent to a server and shared,
>but still searched via the proxy that is downloaded to get pages on
demand?
>-- that you can now do the same kinds of things with whole projects? ....
>Etc.).
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan

Of course, it all depends on what you're trying to do. My own personal
belief is that Smalltalk's syntax is still too geekish for the average
end-user and a more natural-language syntax ala HyperTalk or AppleScript is
better, at least for the beginner.

I know that is a delicate and controversial religious issue, but I'm in
favor (as I've said before) of foreign syntaxes being added *on top of*
Smalltalk, rather than changing Smalltalk itself.

Perhaps a human language mapping of Smalltalk could be created that could
be translated to a sub-set of the full Smalltalk language.

IOW, you script your Squeak stack using the humanesque syntax, which gets
translated directly into Squeak and then compiled into the standard Squeak
VM byte code. The original script is stored as-is, and re-compiled whenever
the scripting window is closed, if it's been changed. If you want to drop
down into Smalltalk inside the scripting window for extra power, you can do
so, as long as you mark the ST code as  standard Smalltalk, so the script
parser doesn't croak on it.

Done right, you could do what they tried to do with AppleScript: create a
multi-human-language scripting platform where the human varients translate
into the same underlying code.

Of course, this should be combined with the usual HC-ish GUI widget
palettes and so on. Different personalities of scripting language, such as
VB or whatever, could be used as well.

[gee, didn't we go down this route before?]

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