Jakob's behavior is a groovy one, allowing MIAWs to close and forget themselves without crashing director; however the original question was whether a MIAW's variable needed to be zeroed after the MIAW was closed and forgotten normally, or whether Director garbage collected the reference on its own.
And actually my code answers that question.
It relies on the fact that a MIAW isn't disposed of before the last reference to it goes away, just like with other Director object types.
What 'forget' does is close the MIAW-window, and remove the reference to the MIAW in the windowList, which -in the standard scenario - when you have no other explicit references, leads to garbage collection.
My code stores a reference to the MIAW in a property, then forgets the MIAW, but the reference in the property is still valid, and the trick is to delay the clearing of that property to an event originating from outside the MIAW.
So I can't quite grasp Tom's message-window example, where the variable is zeroed. It must be some special case, that somehow does not apply to my code. (Rather than my code being a special case... ;-)
Maybe it's because Tom does everything in the message-window, or it's about globals or a DMX issue(but it couldn't be, could it?)... I don't know.
('Scuse me, if I'm a bit rusty, and say something odd.)
Still it's nice to see I'm not the only one who appreciates Jakob's code. ;)
Warren, that's very nicely said! You make me feel missed... you do all me miss right? ;-) I guess at least some of you must have noticed my 'absence'.
The thing is:
I haven't done much Director work since January 2002.
Long story, but I got sort of fed up with it.
Working at a bad company that made me really sick with frustration, the whole bubble-burst scenario, and Macromedia's lack of support for the future of Director, are some of the main ingredients.
Some of you may recognize bits of those feelings.
Many of those of you who do, have already left the party, and probably won't be reading this anyway.
Mine is not the first sortie announced like this.
Director had become a shrinking sandbox to me, and I needed to get out.
So now I have endeavored to really educate myself as an engineer, and I probably won't be looking much back at Director, although I feel that is a shame, but as I see it, it's an abandoned product*, and it's not a viable future, economically or for personal development.
I am looking forward to get some formal knowledge of disciplined development models, and particularly OOD.
I am currently learning JAVA, but that's just the easy part of the study - the math is more scarring!
I am also learning about algorithms, and how to formally describe their correctness:
That's so funny to write three lines of pseudo code in half a minute, and then spend some hours trying to describe the "Loop invariant", that proves that it actually does what it obviously does.
Anyway, I've only just begun, so it's not like my head has actually grown yet.
I have just been on a two day 'camp trip'(or whatever it's called) with the whole "informatics" line of students, some 80 guys, mostly bland 19 year olds, almost straight out of high-school.
I am 37, and when I looked around and wondered too much, the situation just seemed almost surreal.
The second oldest guy, who would probably have earned the nickname "oldtimer", had I not been there, is 24.
But hey - luckily - camping with drunk 19 year olds, is not the main part of the study, and some of them actually seem to have developed human traits already!
I guess, at some point soon, I will fade away completely from these lists, but maybe just for the social value keep 'hopping' at one.
There. The story had to be told at some point.
Wish me good luck on my weird "taking life backwards journey".
Maybe I will wake up some day, as from a weird dream, and say: "What the beep am I doing here, lemme get back to my homies" (That's all you guys).
Time will tell.
Have a nice day, Jakob.
P.S. Tab I hope the off-topicness of this message is ok during the weekends, and considering the apparent implicit "one-time nature" of the issue.
Anyway, you could just unscrubsize me, and get it over with... would I care? (sob)
P.P.S.
On top of that, my first kid is a lovely 5 months daugther, so I've got my scheduled recreational emailing time, sliced to oblivion.
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