At 1:32 PM -0800 on 12/7/99, Alain Farmer wrote:
>The debate rages on concerning the pros and cons of
>including the DO and SEND commands of HyperCard and
>SuperCard into FreeCard.
>
>I am among those that (unrealistically!!!) expect
>FreeScript to support the DO and SEND commands.
>
>I use the SEND command a lot because most of my
>solutions are multi-stack systems, including my
>server-side solutions that use one generic CGI program...
I don't mind send in that way. I've been using examples like that because
they are simple.
Here are send's I don't mind:
send "mouseup" to whatever_constant
send "dosomething a,b,c" to whatever_constant
Here are send's I hate:
send "do"&what&¶mlist to whatever_constant
send "hello" to whatever_variable (not the worst, though...)
>1. Apple's Open Scripting Architecture comes to mind.
>Do we support several scripting languages inside our
>Script Editor? Do we support AppleScript? --
>AppleScript and MacPerl support is one of HyperCard's
>hottest features in my opinion. If we don't, then what
>do we do with HyperTalk syntax related to this
>feature?
Perl is xplatform. Not sure if we'd support AS. If we do, it'll probably be
a plugin on the Mac [see below].
>
>2. Do we support HyperCard's Translator Interface and
>the corresponding language property?
No -- we'll have our own interface, based on the bytecode.
>
>3. Do we support XCMDs and XFCNs? This is arguably
>HC's hottest feature of all. Without externals to
>augment HC's access and other capabilities, HC becomes
>much less interesting. If we don't support them, then
>what do we provide instead?
We support plugins, but probably not XCMDs per se. But on the Mac, we could
support xThings through a plugin :)
> As an alternative, do we
>make it ridiculously easy for users to integrate new
>code segments directly into FreeCard's source?
Rather hard to do...
>4. How realistic would it be to adapt MacPerl's source
>code to give us an enormous leap forward in the
>development of the Mac version of FreeCard? Or, more
>generally, to adapt Perl's source code to give us an
>enormous leap forward in the development of the core
>(multi-platform) version of FreeCard?
I think we've discussed this before, but I'd guess that it'd take quite
some time to make Perl nice.
