Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - Wed, 15 Sep 2004

Working constantly with VBscript to finish customizing the forum, I found I have become quite familiar with it. Basically, all languages are essentially similar … except that they are different!

One interesting aspect of ASP with VBScript is how it sends its output to the webserver. For example, the script is written between <% and %> symbols, and html is written outside of them. Within the script, you can still write html by enclosing it in a Response.Write ” … html … ” command, but here any double quotes within the html needs to have multiple-quotes. Moving html back and forth and having to adjust the quotes is the real pain in editing and restructuring this stuff.

Contrast this to another scripting language I am familiar with (WebFOCUS), which is oppositive in that it assumes the main code is the script and puts the html between delimiters (HTMLBEGIN and HTMLEND). But within the script, a TYPE ” … html … ” command again requires messy multiple-quotes to represent single quotes. Similar to VBScript, but different.

I would have liked it better if the language designers would have used different delimiters in their Response.Write and TYPE commands that were not common in html code, e.g. Response.Write <% ... html ... %> would have fit the VBScript language much better. Oh well. Just a minor annoyance. It’s all hidden anyway once the program is completed. Noone sees the messy code, and as long as we programmers can deal with it, then it is doing its job.