The RR programming model

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Fred_D_Yocum at mail.mcc.org wrote:
> Stacks and Messages paths --and yet that doesn't
> seem clear enough to me.
> Looking at the discussion on the list, it is
> frequently stressed if  you want
> speed, you keep the data out of the stack-card-field
> paradym and put the
> information in a variable or an array.
> 
> Another words if I was designing an address
> database: with my stack hat on I
> think I should create a stack with multiple cards
> each dedicated to the
> information of one individual. But this does not
> seem to be what I should doing.
> I should really be keeping things out of
> stacks-cards-fields except for display
> purposes and then I'm back a not dis-similar method
> of programing than any
> other?.
> 
> Fred
> 

Hi Fred,

Speed is a very 'relative' thing. As long as you don't
have a huge amount of cards and/or don't have to do
complicated sorting all of the time, the stack+card
paradigm works just fine.
Besides, sometimes we're talking about seconds instead
of a minute. If you have a minute to spare, you don't
need to invest extra time to make it as speedy as
possible.
Because it takes time to switch data from one format
to another, and quite a bit of time in both thinking
and programming to make all these switches happen.

One of the differences between HyperCard and
MetaCard/RunRev is that HC used a disk-based scheme,
whereas MC/RR uses a ram-based scheme.
This means that MC/RR have to load the _entire_ stack
into memory, whereas HC would just read what it needed
and swap to disk whenever it needed the memory.
Consequence of this difference: MC/RR is faster, but
large stacks slow it down considerably.

At any rate, for a home-grown application, the
stack+cards approach works just fine. For a commercial
application, you'll probably want to look at a
database back-end anyway. And then, RunRev is an
excellent candidate for the front-end.

Just my 2 euro-cents,

Jan Schenkel.

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)

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