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[Richard Gaskin]

Alain Farmer wrote:

> Wouter wrote:
>> I look at MC and RR as stacks interacting with
>> an engine ... but the impression is growing that 
>> what is called the engine, is something composed
>> of stacks and the engine. Where are the borders
>> between the IDE, stacks and the engine?
> 
> Very *VERY* good point, Wouter.
> 
> Where is it? .. indeed!

The engine is the executable file that drives everything, which gets 
bound to your stackfile when building a standalone.

The engine has no "face" of its own; that is, it has no windows or other 
visible UI components of its own.  It has only the Transcript 
interpreter and a handful of data resources the interpeter needs (such 
as the list of color names, month names, etc.).

Any visible element, such as a window, menu, etc., is part of the IDE.

One of the reasons you may need to use the Resource Mover to copy the 
Ask and Answer dialogs and other components into your stack before 
building is that they live in mctools.mc.  Once your stack is a 
standalone it no longer has access to stacks in mctools.mc.

In most cases, the dividing line between commands and function in the 
engine and anything that might be available in a library or backscript 
is made clear by a convention of prefacing scripted commands with some 
identifier that makes it clear where they come from.

For example, most libURL calls begin with "libUrl", such as 
"libUrlSetStatusField", and most calls to Rev libraries begin with 
"rev", such as "revAppVersion".  I tend to preface stuff in my libraries 
with "fw", and Chipp prefaces his with "alt", etc.

By following these conventions those who publish libraries for others to 
use make it easy to determine where the handler resides.

So when it comes to the template objects, those are handled by the 
engine.  It is possible, however, for any script to modify the 
properties of a template object so that any future objects created will 
have that property, which appears to be what the Rev IDE is doing with 
graphics.

If you want to see the default engine properties reflected in newly 
created objects you can use the reset command, like this:

   reset the templateButton
   reset the templateStack

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com