[Typo3-dev] TypoScript 2: a bit of a RFC

[Elmar Hinz]

Dimitri Tarassenko wrote:
>>You cannot have it both. To be clean, the language mus be reasonable
>>verbose. As some here beging start counting characters to me, this
>>discussion becomes ridiculous. Sorry, but I don't think this is heading
>>in a healthy direction.
> 
> 
> There is some value in it, but verbosity does not bring readability or
> clarity, as you imply. Pascal (my personal favorite) wasn't cleaner
> than C. Regular expressions are ultimately un-verbose, but are quite
> clean. I do agree that character count is irrelevant, but that goes
> both ways - more verbose syntaxes are not necessarily cleaner. It's
> the consistency and use of commonly accepted practices that count. PHP
> designers were very wise in copying C-like control structures and
> operators, for example.
> 

Hello Dmitry,

with the idea of real objects that represent the nodes of the tree, 
verbosity can be much more supported by them, than TS 1 could offer. 
That means this objects could provide speakable error messages.

As for the readabilty of _one_ of the possible languages, that is in 
fact a matter of personal taste. Your comparism with the success of PHP 
is quite good. The typical users came from similar programming languages 
like C, Perl, JavaScript etc.

The main target group of TS aren't programmers but webdesigners, that 
mostly worked with HTML, CSS and some JavaScript. The main target group 
of TS 2 users will be TS 1 users.

The advantage or TS 1 is here that it uses the "object.object.object" 
notation known from JavaScript and that it uses a very simple syntax at 
all. People don't have to learn a syntax that would be typical for 
programming languages. They learn 3 or 5 signs for the basic syntax 
(.=<{}). The Datatypes of the properties they look up in TSref just in time.

For this reasons I propose to stay as close as possible to the syntax of 
TS 1 and to not invent new syntax constructions.

Keep it simple. Most users are not programmers.

Regards

Elmar




























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