>On Dec 12, 2004, at 6:22 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote: > >> I see the point people are making, but I'd sure miss the current >> behavior if it changed. The ability to comment out an entire handler >> by commenting the first line has been in xtalk for 18 years. I have >> become dependent on it. > >As Alex pointed out, it is really only an illusion for Transcript. It >doesn't work. > >As for Hypertalk, my copy of "Hypercard Script Language Guide: The >HyperTalk Language" says "Statements always appear in handlers in a >script. Any part of a statement following HyperTalk's double-hyphen >comment character (--) is ignored by HyperCard." I read this as saying >that the ability was not intended to be part of HyperCard. > >I am curious if others use the technique of commenting out a handler by >commenting out the first line. Maybe there is a way to rescue this >kind of thing in a clean way. > >Dar
Yes I do use it occasionally, when I want to quickly disable a handler for debugging or somesuch purpose. If I want to disable a handler on a more long term basis I would comment the whole thing out. My habit is that I wouldn't actually save a stack with handlers commented out this way. As Jacqueline pointed out, this was a standard practise in Hypercard. And as you note Dar, in that environment there was really no problem with "junk" in the sense you mean because anything outside of a handler declaration was simply ignored, since there was no syntax at all that was valid outside a handler. On the slower machines of those days it was more efficient to disable a script by commenting one line than to comment the whole thing, which might also introduce enough characters to drive the script beyond the old length limit of 30000 characters. I do wonder though how likely it is that you would comment : -- on whatever either accidentally or with any other purpose than disabling the handler ? Martin _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
