awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas) (03/17/88)
I must be in a reflective mood today or something. But I happened across a quote that expresses the difference in attitude between Mac systems and MSDOS tty systems: "We must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express." -- George Santayana People assume that because the Finder, say, has no command language syntax, that it must be trying to pretend that there is no need for Human/machine dialog. This is not so, in my opinion--the Finder's language is simply not text-oriented. The problem comes when you have an unstructured text-oriented language like HyperTalk that *is* trying to pretend that what the human wants can be intuited by the machine. As the quote suggests, HyperTalk, in practice, desperately needs to "institute conventional forms of expression." Alastair Dallas