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A formal language that sounds like

  Put the first word of the third line of field "hello" into field "goodbye"
(which is actually goodbye = hello.lines[3].words[1]) is ridiculous. The HyperCard phenomenon though is something that should be researched by psychologists, because I myself, too, saw it many times how a complete non-techie gets something working in an hour or two. They get it quickly and "amazing" is just not the word. No other programming tool is as good at that as HyperCard.

And like the rest of the old good Apple stuff HyperCard can be traced back to Xerox PARC: that's NoteCards, a Lisp-based hyper-text system, according to Wikipedia.



Inform 7 programs read this way: http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

This style makes it harder to write but easier for novices to read. It's not the tradeoff you would want for serious programming - the training wheels get old fast, but it makes sense if you need or expect lots of novices to read it.


It looks like a descriptive language rather than a Turing-complete programming language. Or am I wrong?


Programming in it is a little like prolog. You declare a bunch of facts and you declare some pattern rules.

Oh, and there is this cute little story too: http://www.math.psu.edu/clemens/IF/Turing/source.html




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