Hi, I have some basic questions about MetaCard that I've been pondering
over the last few days. Most of them are probably Scott questions, but if
anyone else has any practical experience, feel free to jump in. Here they
are:
What's the practical limit on the number of cards in a stack? I'm
assuming that MetaCard's built-in system for storing cards won't actually
handle, say, forty-two million cards, but how far will it go? Is the
limit affected by the platform, or the power of the computer? Does
performance slowly taper off, drop like a stone, or does a pixie pop up
on screen and tweak your nose when you try to create that last extra card?
Similarly, what's the practical limit on objects on a card? In a
background? Items in an array? Who's tortured MetaCard the worst? :-)
Just as an example, I've done stacks in HyperCard with several thousand
cards, with no ill effects, although others have been mortified at my
daring in doing so. I plan to do similar stacks in MetaCard.
I wrote a project that used a tab-delimited text variable as a database,
and used lineoffset to find things in it. I found that performance was
much better if I first processed the variable into hundred-line chunks,
then did lineoffsets on those. This was the case with anything more than
a few hundred lines. Does this fit with your experiences with MetaCard?
Is there a better built-in way? Would an array be faster?
Is there any way to pare down the MetaCard runtime when creating a
standalone, to only include the things you need? Or is there a way to
remove the graphical aspects of MetaCard entirely, leaving just the
MetaTalk engine's ability to process MetaTalk? I'm (idly) thinking of a
competitor to Perl/Python/Rebol.
Thanks!
gc
