Richard Gaskin wrote:
It may be tempting to want to implement some custom behavior for,
say, the truncate function. Raney felt that all that did is risk
confusing anyone who calls that function while your handler is in
the message path, so in his view it didn't merely expode the size
of the token table, it polluted it.
I went to the mat with him over this one years ago when I was porting an
HC project. He said, "If you need a custom behavior, use a custom
name." I said, "But I *need* to override the built-in function!" and he
asked simply, "'Need'? Why?" I couldn't think of a truly necessary case.
I heckled him about the same thing once. I really did have a necessary
case, but it was a one-time event.
I was converting a HC stack for a client. The original author had added
sound effects to every action, hundreds and hundreds of them, throughout
the stack. It was a business stack. Every time the office worker used
it, they had to turn off the sound on the computer or else the squeaks
and beeps and plonks and tweets drove everyone nuts. They wanted me to
take out the sounds, which I fully agreed with.
It would have been *so* easy to write a single "play" trap handler in
the stack script. But I couldn't do it, I had to search through
thousands of lines of code in hundreds of cards and remove each
instance. Blech.
But I've never needed to override the engine in anything I've written
myself. I've only needed it in self-defense of others.
--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | [email protected]
HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
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