SimpleTalk Systems

[TerryL]

SimpleTalk Systems, link: https://simpletalk.systems/
Don't dismiss SimpleTalk out of hand. This is a working model of an xtalk-to-javascript translator in a browser. Use left/right arrowKeys to move between cards, up/down arrowKeys to move between the three demo stacks. R-click a button for a popup list of choices. The button properties inspector is nicely done. There are some awkward implementations, and Tom's WebTalk blows it away even at this early stage. Still there's valuable insights hidden within it for OpenXTalk.org. Thanks Paul for drawing attention to it.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Still there's valuable insights hidden within it for OpenXTalk.org.

Yeah, I thought it was really cool once I understood how it was supposed to work, which is not at all obvious at first.

If nothing else maybe borrow some IDE Edit-mode UI ideas from it (I kind of like the right-click for tools in a section frame thing). Their xTalk interpreter is a bit off to me though, like having property names be quoted seems non-standard for xTalks.

It's MIT licensed so we can fix that, or do whatever we want with it, even make a commercial product if one wanted to, so that's pretty awesome!

[TerryL]

Paul, have you made a deep dive into it? I read you've been collecting useful javascript routines, anything useful in the SimpleTalk website? What translator strategy is it using? Tom's been quiet since switching back to regex-only for WebTalk. I hope you're still collaborating.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Paul, have you made a deep dive into it? I read you've been collecting useful javascript routines, anything useful in the SimpleTalk website? What translator strategy is it using? Tom's been quiet since switching back to regex-only for WebTalk. I hope you're still collaborating.

Honestly, I've had too much going on in my life to do anything in the way of collaborating, and I know Tom has other stuff going on in real life. I've also been backing up server and getting ready for the host move but that still hasn't switched over yet.

I'm more than happy to contribute to Tom's continuing the reg-ex based interpreter when he's ready.

I would like to see either method handle some compound expressions (like 'put word 1 of item 3 of the text of me into the last word of me'). It's not easy to write a tokenizer / parser for. I've noticed that sort of thing can trip up Dan's HC Sim interpreter too. I'm thinking there needs to be mechanism for multiple re-iterations over each line to make sure all tokens get resolved into some valid value before trying to execute a line of script. I think 'Chunk expressions' for both text and UI components, are one of the major features that make xTalk unique compared to other programming languages.

When I do have a free minute I've continued taking bits of non-UI oriented OXT engine syntax and see if I can implement it with ES6 JS in HyperCard Simulator, but the JS code should be useable with any JS based xT interpreter. But for UI stuff, that would be specific to the implementation...what I mean for example is 'the openStacks' / stacksInUse(), the handler I made for that may be specific to HyperCard Simulator's 'Stack' objects.

I haven't had a deep look into SimpleTalk's 'xCard' setup, but I could easily see borrowing something like it's scrollbar / progress bar implementation for other web-xTalk project(s).