Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Today's scriptingNews Outline

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/29/1999; 9:22:52 AM
Topic:Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:10199
Prev/Next:10198 / 10200

Digging up background for the tours for the Frontier site, I came across this specification, written in 1960, that describes what was then a new programming language called Algol 60. It's the basic design for many current programming languages, including C, Pascal, Java, JavaScript, and UserTalk, the language built into Frontier. I was five years old when this spec came out.

Except for the GOTO statement and keywords appearing in 'single quotes', the design of Algol-60 is the way all block structured languages work today. Was it the first language to be specified by a BNF grammar? I'm not sure. Lisp may have been first with a formal definition. Most earlier languages were designed in an ad hoc way, and could not be formally specified.

James Spahr has DreamWeaver/Mac integrated with our CMS using the AppleScript XML-RPC connector. Bravo!

I believe we nailed the problem in the XML-RPC DG interface, thanks to patience and intelligence from Ben Griffiths.

According to LinuxToday, mySql is now open source. Coool!

Eric Kidd: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar wasn't written to compare proprietary software with open source software. Instead, it was written to compare two ways of building open source software." I didn't know that.

On the XML-DEV list, Tim Bray takes issue with multiple namespaces in the XHTML spec. It's over my head, but if Tim says it won't work, I believe him.

I'm working on the Frontier website this morning, building a series of tours to link into the pages hanging off the home page. Finally it's all making sense to me, the What is Frontier? stuff, which everyone likes, is the table of contents for the site. I'm just hotting up the bold items and linking them to pages that take you on a tour of the features.

Along the way I'm discovering some gems. For example, this story explains outlining in Frontier. With the recent renewed interest in outliners this has become an interesting page in a new way. Note that we describe outlining in Frontier in the context of script editing. In Frontier 6 the outliner became more generally useful for writing, and the docs don't reflect that yet.

If you are an expert Frontier user you can help out and write a tour or two. It's quite easy, and I even wrote a spec that explains how to do it.

New tours: Scripting in Frontier, Frontier's object database.



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