Applescript error?

[Richard Gaskin]

Ben Rubinstein wrote:
> But one to thing watch re XCMDs; Rev implements the original (or strictly
> speaking, I think, the 1.1) XCMD API; but not the subsequent enhancements
> (most of which came in with HC 2, IIRC).  In theory, XCMDs could be written
> so that they tested if a particular function was available; but as far as I
> know, few if any ever did.  If an XCMD makes an unsupported call, Rev does
> the right thing in terms of supplying a polite response, but many (most?)
> XCMDs don't check it properly, and crash.  If you have access to the source
> code of the XCMD, you can very likely code round the missing calls (I found
> a bunch of mine were just using some convenience functions like StrToRect,
> which it weren't in the earlier API (and blush, of course I wasn't
> checking), so it was trivial to replace these calls).

Well said.

It may be worth noting that while more than a dozen apps once supported 
the HC 1.x XCMD interface, the HC2.x interface was so steeped in 
HC-specific structures that only HC itself ever supported it.

More importantly, most of the things folks had to resort to externals to 
accomplish in HC are built in with Rev, so with a couple of lines of 
revised scripting you can ditch those externals and have the 
functionality you're looking for on all platforms.

Since I first started working with this engine in 1997, I've only used 
one external -- written for Windows, which has since been replaced by 
native commands.  Everything else was replaced with Transcript.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev