NewtonScript is a programming language developed by Apple Computer in the early 1990s for its Newton platform, a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs). The language was created by Walter Smith with the aim of providing a highly flexible and dynamic scripting environment tailored to the resource-constrained Newton devices. Its design focused on ease of development for applications that ran on handheld devices, offering a balance between performance and the ability to build rich user interfaces and interaction models.
NewtonScript is an object-oriented language with dynamic inheritance, meaning objects can change their structure at runtime. This feature was quite advanced for the time and allowed developers to create applications with complex, interactive behaviors in a relatively concise and easy-to-understand syntax. Unlike more traditional object-oriented languages like C++, which have more static class structures, NewtonScript offered a level of flexibility that was well-suited for the evolving needs of mobile applications.
One of the key design goals for NewtonScript was to optimize memory usage and performance, given the limited hardware capabilities of the Newton devices. As a result, the language introduced unique concepts such as "frames," which are essentially lightweight objects that can dynamically change their properties. This made it possible to store and manipulate data efficiently without the overhead associated with more traditional object-oriented systems.
A typical NewtonScript program consists of frames and scripts (methods attached to frames), which handle user inputs, display information, and perform computations. Here's a simple example of how NewtonScript might define an object with properties and methods:
person := {
name: "Alice",
age: 30,
greet: func() begin
print("Hello, my name is " & name);
end
};In this example, person is a frame (an object) with two properties (name and age) and a method (greet) that prints a greeting.
NewtonScript was specifically designed to take advantage of the Newton's handwriting recognition and innovative user interface, making it easy for developers to create applications that could respond to gestures, taps, and other forms of input. The language’s ability to handle object-oriented structures in a lightweight manner helped developers manage the limited memory and processing power available on the Newton devices.
Though the Newton platform itself was eventually discontinued in 1998, NewtonScript stands out as a significant contribution to the development of programming languages for mobile and embedded systems. It influenced later mobile development environments by demonstrating how scripting languages could be adapted for constrained hardware environments without sacrificing functionality.
Today, NewtonScript is not in active use, but it remains an interesting historical example of early mobile development, combining object-oriented principles with dynamic runtime features. Its impact can still be traced in the way modern mobile programming languages and frameworks are designed to optimize for performance and flexibility in resource-limited environments.