The Revolution will be programmed, Part III

16.10.2009
In (which was online only) I continued my exploration of a cool programming system called , focusing on the tool's object-oriented, event-driven architecture. This week we'll look at the product's English-like language, a style referred to as by some cynics.

Here's a thing about Revolution scripting language; it is, indeed, kind of "wordy." Want to put a rounded-up value into a field shown in the user interface?

put round(22.3) into field "Number"

You can also use the "the" form when using a function such as date that takes no or just one parameter. Thus the following lines are equivalent:

put date() into field "field1" put the date into field "field1"

You can also "get" values from functions or variables. This command, along with a number of others, such as such as convert (which reformats dates and times), read from file, and ask and answer (which both display dialog boxes), stores the result in a special variable called "it". For example: