MOD function does not work! So be warned!

[Michael D Mays]

Rob Cozens of rcozens at pon.net wrote the following on 4/4/02 9:59 AM

> Or is the real issue here the failure of HyperTalk, MC, & RR
> documentation writers to add a line indicating only non-decimal
> arguments are legal?  The HC documentation just says "numbers",
> implying one could legally script something like "999.999 mod
> 333.333".

xTalks are purported to be 'typeless'. But they aren't. The engine which
drives the engine is a binary machine. Is one "one", 1 or 1.0? It depends
upon the context. What this means in effect is that the rules for typing in
xTalk are more complex than the rules for typing in a 'typed' language.

99.9 and maybe a few more 9s of the time this doesn't matter or the
automatic typing rules work the way we think they should.

xTalk scripters are a prior ill equipped to deal with numbers. When
HyperTalk became PPC native, the precision to which numbers were calculated
decreased by two or three orders of magnitude. And as you point out, where
in any xTalk documentation does anyone talk about numbers. Only the
HyperCard documentation talks about SANE and number precision. But even that
discussion leaves one sadly lacking. And when Apple released the PPC version
of HyperCard, the documentation was not updated for the new PPC numerics.

Caveat emptor.:(

michael