Why isn't Rev more popular?

[J. Landman Gay]

Bill Marriott wrote:
> Well for reasons I may not be aware of, all the new commands seem to be in the format, "revDoSomething" followed by parameters. Example:
> 
>     revAddXMLNode treeID, parentPath, nodeName, nodeContents
> 
> the official example:
> 
>     revAddXMLNode 9,"/","Balls",""
> 
> Why couldn't you say something like
> 
>     add node "Balls" to the root path of XML tree id 9
> 

These aren't really additions to Transcript. All the language elements 
that start with "rev" are actually scripted handlers stored in various 
Revolution libraries. If you poke around in the IDE scripts, you can 
find these handlers. They were written by Runtime to provide convenient 
access to commonly-used actions. For example, all the "revPrintWhatever" 
commands (revPrintField, revPrintText) were written to provide us a 
convenient way to do quick printing without writing a printing handler 
ourselves. "RevGoURL" is the same thing; if you look at it, you'll see 
that it in turn uses the libURL library, which in turn uses the native 
Transcript socket commands (which *are* part of Transcript) to do its magic.

Actual Transcript additions are added occasionally but rarely. In most 
cases, existing tokens are expanded whenever possible instead. Thus, we 
got new functionality recently for the "answer" command that allows Mac 
users to filter files the way Windows users do.

New engine-related behaviors will spawn new keywords with standard 
Transcript syntax. When image manipulation and embedded images in fields 
were first introduced, we got a whole bunch of new keywords to support 
those features.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com