Ken Ray wrote:
It may be appropriate to bring up again the default setting of the destroy property for new stacks. Should it be made on or remain off?
Made on by default - more often than not, you want it set to true, IMHO.
In my own work it usually makes little difference.
What are the benefits each way?
Well, for me there are four reasons for having destroystack (and destroyWindow too btw) turned on by default:
1) I like knowing that when I close something it's really closed. Not a lot to ask, IMHO.
2) I sometimes like to copy a substack from one stack to another (i.e. one product to another), and it is easiest for me to open the substack, clone it, close the substack and it's mainstack, open the "other" stack, and then set the mainstack of the clone to the new mainstack. In the process, I change the name back to what it originally was, and if the destroystack wasn't set to true in the stack I was cloning, I'll get a "purge" error message (which is annoying).
3) It's a good way to manage memory (although with today's computers (as well as those reaching several years back)) it's not as big of an issue, but better to err on the side of *not* keeping everything loaded in RAM. It seems to me to be extremely rare to have a circumstance where you actually appreciate that your stack opens faster since it's already "in memory" - MetaCard is pretty darn fast regardless. Perhaps this was important "back in the day", but it doesn't seem so now. (Side note: I've *never* had a *need* to have the destroyStack false, and I've been using MC for 8 years+.)
4) It just *seems* like the right thing to do - it's kind of like having the default itemDelimiter as "|" and you're always having to set it back to ",".
Anyway, that's my 2 cents...
Good points. I'll add a preference for that in the MC IDE.
Of maybe better: how about the ability to define a stack to be used as a template for new stacks? That way we can handle destroyStack, alwaysbuffer, rect, and anything else we want exactly as we want it.
Worth pursing a change to the default behavior of the engine? I'd love to see the alwaysBuffer set to true as well....
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
