13 Facts About HyperTalk

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.

HyperTalk scripts resembled written English and used a logical structure similar to that of the Pascal programming language.

HyperTalk did not oppose the development of imitations like SuperCard, but it created the HyperTalk Standards Committee to avoid incompatibility between language variants.

For example, in HyperTalk's put assignment command, the variable was placed at the end of the statement:.

HyperTalk code has the side-effect of creating the variable theResult on the fly.

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Key concept in HyperTalk was the way it referred to containers through a navigational system based on the visual hierarchy of the stack.

HyperTalk included the me container which acted in the same fashion as the self qualifier found in most object-oriented languages, allowing simple access to the current container object.

HyperTalk included functions for chunking strings using a substring-find operation using the in operator.

HyperTalk used the same chunking system to produce structures like arrays or lists.

Various types of data could be imported into a HyperTalk script using strings that would get parsed as required.

HyperTalk used an object-oriented concept for calling scripts, with objects in the stack sending "events" as messages that would be processed by handlers that declared their interest in receiving the events using the on syntax.

HyperTalk provided 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 start to end and the click at position commands.

Many method names first popularized by HyperTalk made it into later languages, such as the onmouseup event handler in JavaScript.