Michael,
> 1. Why has (the floatPrecision) not been updated to
> (_movie.floatPrecision)?
That's a bug, there's no "reason" for it other than human error.
> 2. Does any subtle difference exist between (the stage) and
> _movie.stage?
None that immediately come to mind.
> 3. Is there an SES10 equivalent to (the systemdate), where I can be
> certain that the month/day/year values aren't flipped around when
> dealing with international machines? And why is (the systemdate)
> seemingly undocumented?
You can still use the systemDate, even under SES of 10. Please keep in mind
that setting the SES value does not necessarily disable older verbose
syntax, support is still there. It's just that the SES value affects a
particular set of methods/functions/properties, and the systemDate is not
one of them.
Is there a new DOM replacement for 'the systemDate'? Yes, in the form of
_system.date(), but it does not offer 1-for-1 functionality. The older 'the
systemDate' returned a date object whose properties you could query (year,
month, day) whereas the newer _system.date() returns a string that you must
parse once you've sorted out the expected format of the string. Ugh. The
decision was made back in my QA days oh so long ago (I'm joking, it was just
over a year ago actually) and I for one disagreed with it. So there is no
direct identical replacement in the new DOM world.
Fallout from that decision and the decision that older verbose syntax isn't
officially supported anymore. Of course player support remains and will
remain for verbose code (to allow older movies to continue functioning),
this new status is intended to indicate that bug fixing, feature extending
and documentation expectations should change. The entry for 'the systemDate'
was removed and instead its official replacement has been documented, look
up "_system" and "date() (system)" in the docs for MX'04 and you'll find
them
Not the best of scenarios but I figured it's best to lay it out honestly
instead of ducking and hiding... Hope that helps at least somewhat.
> 4. Is it OK to mix syntax styles?
> set the foreColor of line(_mouse.mouseLine) of member("someText") to 4
> tell (_movie.stage) to halt -- even though tell is now obsolete
Is it "OK" as in will it work? Yes, there are many cases where it would
function properly but also others to be careful of. Is it "OK" from a
good-practices point of view, I tend to say no, go one way or the other but
don't mix on a single line of code (strong personal preference based of
experience in Director - your mileage may vary). The truth is that your code
is all tokenized when you compile the script and that tokenization drops all
signs of verbose versus DOT syntax and so as long as it compiles you are in
theory good to go. Typical precedence considerations take place, things in
the innermost () get evaluated/compiled, then things progress "outward".
Cheers,
Tom Higgins - Technical Product Manager
Macromedia Director and the Shockwave Player
http://www.markme.com/thiggins/
[To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to
http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email
[email protected] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for
learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
