hypercard domenu comptability

[Alain Farmer]

Hello Eric Engle,

> Something about metacard that really bothers me...
> domenu... domenu in hypercard is really important
> and convenient.

Indeed. I have longed for doMenu in MC, many times,
for many years. I had a in-depth debate about it with
Scott Raney, back when MC was still owned and hosted
by Scott. He concluded with the argument that Richard
reiterated in a very-recent post to this list, e.g.
MC's speed is dramatically improved without "doMenu'.

> problem is: the menus in metacard don't match.
> solution would be:... could have all the menu
> items that HC has: "cut picture" instead of...

There is nothing preventing you from editing MC's menu
bar. It is precisely what I did when I crafted FreeGUI
which, btw, has ALL of the menus and menuItems as they
are in HyperCard. Therefore you might want to download
FreeGUI, as a good starting point for your alternative
menu bar.

> This is an avoidable and easily solved problem.
> the invisible button would not solve syntax
> like doMenu item 3 of menu 2 (or similar) but
> I never used that syntax ...

Some of do use that syntax, and it was awesome in
terms of learning to script HyperCard gra-du-ally, by
coding  exactly what the user normally does manually.
One very simple command goes a l-o-o-o-n-g way. It
accomplishes many many things, from navigation to
authoring. :-)

> What do people think?

I have no comment to make on your "invisible menu"
idea but it seems to me that you could achieve your
goal by scripting a "doMenu" handler, in MetaCard,
which maps the doMenu requested with its corresponding
equivalent in MC code.

Example:

doMenu "New stack..." without dialog

gets handled by :

on doMenu menuItem
  --
  -- setup a CASE statement,
  -- one case for each menuItem possibility
  --
  -- case where menuItem is the above
  create new stack
  break
  --
  -- other cases where menuItem is other
  --
end doMenu

Good hunting,

Alain


		
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