Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!think!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bgsuvax!edwards
From: edwards@bgsuvax.UUCP (Bruce Edwards)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: I'll Never Make You Declare Variables
Summary: Variable declaration
Message-ID: <1678@bgsuvax.UUCP>
Date: 8 Mar 88 16:23:52 GMT
References: <1149@cpocd2.UUCP> <7500@apple.Apple.Com> <1007@pur-phy> <7574@apple.Apple.Com>
Organization: Bowling Green State University B.G., Oh.
Lines: 16

In article <7574@apple.Apple.Com>, winkler@Apple.COM (Dan Winkler) writes:
> Any change I make to HyperTalk from now on is guaranteed to be upward
> compatible.  I might add new features, but I'll never break old
> scripts.  Therefore, I'll never require variables to be declared.  I
> may provide an optional way to declare them, perhaps with a type, so
> that I can do type checking for you or, when I get to writing a
> compiler, generate better code, but to uniformly require it would break
> existing scripts.  Similarly, I'll never disallow unquoted literals,
> although I may provide a way for you to turn them off when you want
> to.

I am perfectly willing to accept a language will a little looser way
of dealing with my human tendency to leave things out, like quotes and
variable definitions and I applaud Dan's stick-to-ed-ness on keeping
things upward compatible. This isn't FORTRAN guys....its something new,
let's give it a chance to work on us as we work with it.