long ago in Hypercard land there was a product that would compile hypertalk into an XFCN or XCMD. I would not be surprised if someone on this list wrote it. Perhaps it is time for them to update and productize it?
That was CompileIt!, written by Tom Pittman. I enjoyed working with an unreleased derivative of it made by Mark Hanrek, which automated a lot of the symbol linking and stuff that made Pittman's interface nearly impossible to work with.
On top of that, since xTalk was never designed for compilation you had to do a lot of funky syntax to get any reasonable compilation. In retrospect, working with C is in many ways simpler than the odd Symbol Table-HyperTalk mish-mash that CompileIt! required.
But more relevant for Rev is that CompileIt! would require far more than an update for anything beyond the 68k instruction set it was designed for. It would require a complete reqwrite to handle PPC, Intel, OS X, and the various flavors of UNIX, Linux, and Windows. That would leave only the UI, which wasn't much to write home about. ;)
Maybe another approach would be to cache the compiled Transcript. The engine already generates the code anyway, so we know the core foundation is workable and solid. Attempting to compile in advance of runtime would likely require some changes to syntax for those scripts targeted for compilation, but should be theoretically doable.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation __________________________________________________ Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
