HyperTalk

HyperTalk is a high-level programming language created in 1987 by Dan Winkler and used in conjunction with Apple Computer's HyperCard hypermedia program by Bill Atkinson. The main target audience of HyperTalk were beginning programmers, hence HyperTalk programmers were usually called authors, and the process of writing programs was called "scripting". HyperTalk scripts are fairly similar to written English, and use a logic structure similar to the Pascal programming language.

The case-insensitive language was at first interpreted, since HyperCard 2.x 'virtually compiled'. It supports the basic control structures of procedural languages: repeat for/while/until, if/then/else, as well as function and message "handler" calls (a handler is a subroutine, a message handler is a procedure). Data types are transparent to the user, conversion happens transparently in the background between strings and numbers. There are no classeses or data structures in the traditional sense, their place was taken by special stringss, or rather "lists" of "items" delimited by a certain character (in later versions the "itemDelimiter" property allowed choosing an arbitrary character).

Table of contents

1 Object-Oriented HyperTalk
2 Extending HyperTalk
3 Descendants of HyperTalk
4 Some sample scripts

Object-Oriented HyperTalk

However, HyperTalk was by no means a strictly procedural language. Scripts were associated with objects in HyperCard files (so-called "stacks"), and HyperTalk allowed manipulating these objects in various ways, changing their properties using the "set" command, for example. HyperTalk also provided full-blown script control over the built-in drawing tools, simply by scripting the needed changes in paint tools and simulating mouse movements using the "drag from to " and the "click at " commands.

HyperTalk also used "messages" (i.e. events) sent to objects to handle user interaction. E.g. the "mouseDown" message was sent to a button when the user clicked it, and "mouseUp" was sent when the user released the mouse inside it to trigger its action. Similarly, it had the periodic "idle" message, "mouseEnter", "mouseLeave", ... and various other messages related to navigation between different "cards" in a HyperCard stack, user input (keyDown, functionKey, ...), system events. As far as the scripters were concerned, there were no main event loops or anything of that kind.

Extending HyperTalk

Although the HyperTalk language languished just like HyperCard itself, it received a second lease on life through its plugin protocol, so-called External Commands (XCMDs) and External Functions (XFCNs), which were native code containers attached to stacks (as Macintosh-specific resources) with a single entry point and return value. XCMDs and XFCNs could be called just like regular message and function handlers from HyperTalk scripts, and were also able to send messages back to the HyperCard application. Some enterprising XCMD authors added advanced features like full color support (ColorizeHC, HyperTint, AddColor), multiple special-purpose windows (Prompt, Tabloid, Textoid, Listoid, ShowDialog, MegaWindows), drag and drop support and various hardware interfaces to the language.

Descendants of HyperTalk

Various languages have taken their cues from HyperTalk. There are straight clones like

SuperTalk - The language of SuperCard by Bill Appleton, the first HyperCard clone ever. Appleton also wrote the popular WorldBuilder adventure construction kit.
PlusTalk (?) - of Spinnaker Plus (originally by the German Format Verlag), which was used as the basis for OMO.
MediaTalk - The language of Oracle Media Objects, the first cross-platform HyperCard clone, and the only one that was truly modular.
CompileIt!-Talk - A HyperCard stack by Tom Pittman that allowed compiling native 68000 machine code (e.g. for XCMDs and XFCNs) from HyperTalk code, and calling the native Macintosh toolbox routines.
Double-XX-Talk (?) - Double-XX was a lightweight HyperCard clone that shipped as an addition to CompileIt! and allowed running XCMDs and XFCNs without HyperCard, and even included a small HyperTalk interpreter.
Transcript (fka MetaTalk) - The language of the Unix-originated HyperCard clone Revolution (formerly MetaCard).
SenseTalk - The language of the NeXT-originated HyperSense and the VPN-based testing tool Eggplant.

As well as second-level clones like

Lingo - the programming language of Macromedia Director
AppleScript - the main scripting language of Apple's MacOS.
SerfTalk - a HyperTalk-on-steroids that supported pretty much every modern feature, but disappeared from the face of the earth during its beta phase.

Although Asymmetrix Toolbook is often also considered a HyperCard clone, its scripting language (as far as I have been able to determine by looking at Toolbook Instructor) bears hardly any resemblance to HyperTalk.

These clones and dialects (commonly referred to under the moniker of "xTalk"-languages) added various features to the language that are expected from a modern programming language, like exception handling, user-defined object properties, timers, multi-threading and even user-defined objects.

Some sample scripts


on mouseUp
 put 100,100 into pos

 repeat with x = 1 to the number of card buttons

   set the location of card button x to pos

   add 15 to item 1 of pos

 end repeat

end mouseUp
on mouseDown
 put "Disk:Folder:MyFile" into filePath -- no need to declare variables

 if there is a file filePath then

   open file filePath

   read from file filePath until return

   put it into cd fld "some field"

   close file filePath

   set the textStyle of character 1 to 10 of card field "some field" to bold

 end if

end mouseDown
function replaceStr pattern,newStr,inStr
 repeat while pattern is in inStr

   put offset(pattern,inStr) into pos

   put newStr into character pos to (pos +the length of pattern)-1 of inStr

 end repeat

 return inStr

end replaceStr