Welcome to Rahul's NewtonScript information page




NewtonScript is a programming language used to create software for the Apple Newton PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). The Newton is no longer produced by Apple, and the website for it has been removed, along with all the developer links. But still, there is a large number of people which use the Newton and make software for it.

The language was designed by Walter Smith. It's design was infulenced by LISP and SELF.It is a special purpose language, and like a lot of other special purpose languages, it is very liberal. No variables need to be declared. The type of a variable can be declared at compile time. The language is object oriented, but it follows a single layer abstraction paradym. I haven't come across any such language yet, but the author claims that when designing GUI applications, declaring direct objects, instead of using a data model, is a more natural approach. The Language has some oddities, like the fact that to add a tripple nested field into a record, like person.address.city.zip can be added by just a simple assignment,
person.address.city.zip:=32901, but to add an element to an array, it must be done explicitly by using addArraySlot(ArrName, Number). Other languages that allow dynamic addition to arrays usually work the vice versa. An exhaustive review of this language is provided on The NewtonScript Programming Language written by Arno Schoedl.

Some sample code for NewtonScript can be found on a page that is simply called NewtonScript. It also contains some sample packages. This site is a part of the Apple Newton Webring. The webring contains a few sites which have a little information on the Newton.

Some languages that are similar to the Newton are, AWK, BASIC, etc. NewtonScript's syntax is largely similar to Pascal. It combines it with the liberal concept of BASIC, hence making a language that is very easy to learn. This has triggered a lot of hobby programmers to go into it and produce a large variety of shareware and freeware software in it. A more restrictive programming group, might find it uneasy, since it gives a lot of margin for error. NewtonScript could possibly be considered a programming alternative on a lot of programming problems, but as an application development enviorment for the comercial market, it is not really the best alternative.