My Entry for the RR Wish List

[Rob Cozens]

Hi All,

In the aftermath of indulging my impulse to respond to "it should only take
one line in C", I got to thinking how much CompileIt helped me to expand my
HyperTalk applications' capabilities and essentially invoke ToolBox
commands & functions from within HyperTalk.  I took out Danny Goodman's
HyperCard Developers Guide and compared the C & Pascal externals source
code with the CompileIt scripts I wrote to perform the same function or
invoke the same ToolBox object.

IMFO, in terms of relative programmer efficiency, programming in
xTalk/CompileIt is to programming in C as programming in C is to
programming in assembler.  My frustration with assembler came very quickly
when I realized I was typing half a page of instructions to accomplish
something I could do in one line of FORTRAN or PL/1.  And so it was with C
once I learned HyperTalk.  Even in Pascal, which I much prefer to C, the
overhead involved in writing externals was such I tried to avoid using
them.  Once I had CompileIt, I was anxious to write my next external, and
stopped looking for workarounds to avoid them.  Before Revolution,
CompileIt was my second-most important application behind HyperCard.

MC/RR were designed to minimize the need for externals, and I'm going into
my redesign with the goal of eliminating all platform-specific aspects of
OenoLog.  However, it appears from the List traffic that many people still
find the need for externals.

I would be willing to pay a seperate license fee for a tool that would
allow me to create externals scripted in Transcript.

Rob Cozens, CCW

"Where but America can the person who lost the popular vote become
President without a coup?"