HyperTalk is a discontinued high-level, procedural programming language created in 1987 by Dan Winkler and used in conjunction with Apple Computer's HyperCard hypermedia program by Bill Atkinson. Because the main target audience of HyperTalk was beginning programmers, HyperTalk programmers were usually called "authors" and the process of writing programs was known as "scripting". HyperTalk scripts resembled written English and used a logical structure similar to that of the Pascal programming language.
HyperTalk supported the basic control structures of procedural languages: repeat for/while/until, if/then/else, as well as function and message "handler" calls (a function handler was a subroutine and a message handler a procedure). Data types usually did not need to be specified by the programmer; conversion happened transparently in the background between strings and numbers. There were no classes or data structures in the traditional sense; in their place were special string literals, or "lists" of "items" delimited by commas (in later versions the "itemDelimiter" property allowed choosing an arbitrary character). Code execution typically began as a response to an event such as a mouse click on a UI widget.
In the late 1980s, Apple considered[1] using HyperCard's HyperTalk scripting language as the standard language across the company and within its classic Mac OS operating system, as well as for interprocess communication between Apple and non-Apple products. The company did not oppose the development of imitations like SuperCard, but it created the HyperTalk Standards Committee to avoid incompatibility between language variants.[1] The case-insensitive language was initially interpreted, but gained just-in-time compilation with HyperCard 2.0.[2]
^ abFlynn, Laurie (1989-02-27). "Apple Ponders Standardizing on HyperTalk". InfoWorld. p. 31.
^Dave Kelly, "Tools of the Trade: CompileIt! 2.0!", MacTech, Vol. 7 No. 9
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Shader Language (HLSL) Hollywood HolyC (TempleOS) Hop Hopscotch Hope Hume HyperTalk Hy Io Icon IBM Basic assembly language IBM HAScript IBM Informix-4GL IBM...
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programming paradigms.: xxvi In the late 1980s Apple considered using HyperCard's HyperTalk scripting language as the standard language for end-user development...
string concatenation operator in many BASIC dialects, AppleScript, Lingo, HyperTalk, and FileMaker.[citation needed] In Ada it applies to all one-dimensional...
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originally arose separately as a sibling, both influenced by Apple's HyperTalk. A system for the J programming language has been developed, adding coercion...
variable from one type to another. These quirks have been the subject of a talk entitled Wat. ECMAScript is dynamically typed. Thus, a type is associated...
Haskell 2010 Haxe Application, general, web Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes No HyperTalk Application, RAD, general Yes No No Yes No Yes Weakly typed Unknown Io...
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Forth Fortran (better modularity in later Standards) F GAUSS Go Harbour HyperTalk Java Groovy Join Java Tea JOVIAL Julia Language H Lasso Modula-2 (fundamentally...
commercial cross-platform rapid application development language inspired by HyperTalk LiveCode (company), a computer software company This disambiguation page...
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