noob questions

[kee nethery]

> If you're using HC extensively, you're gonna love Rev! I guarantee it.

I have only three complaints about Rev as compared to Hypercard.

1. I cannot work on a stack on the machine that it is being run on 
unless I want to buy a copy of Rev for each machine that I run the 
stacks on. That makes troubleshooting and minor enhancements not as 
easy as they are under Hypercard. Instead of modifying the stack on the 
machine that is set up to run the stack, I have to modify the Rev stack 
on my development system and then move it over to the machine that is 
going to run it to do my testing. Rinse and repeat. That bouncing back 
and forth between machines slows the development cycle for me.

2. There is no way to embed debugging checkpoints in a standalone. In 
Hypercard I have code that handles all the common branches. I do not 
code to handle the conditional branches that should never happen. But 
what I do do is to check for those conditions and if they ever occur, 
hypercard emails me, and then breaks into the debugger. I go look at 
the code and the debug variables and fix the code to handle those 
conditions in the stack with the conditions it hit on the machine where 
it hit those conditions. In Rev, it is not as easy. I have to build a 
routine that simulates the debugger and saves a bunch of data to a file 
and hope that I have collected the variables that are going to help me 
understand where in the code the problem occurred and what variables 
caused that condition. Then I have to go back to my development 
environment and try to simulate and fix it. Rinse and repeat.

3. I'm still not that clear on how the sub-stack thing works, 
especially when the sub-stacks have sub-stacks. I'm also not that clear 
on storing data in stacks and how to attach a data stack to a 
standalone and then to have the standalone create the data stack if it 
does not exist and then to populate the data stack. Storing data into a 
Hypercard stack was conceptually very simple and in Rev it is not as 
simple (at least to me).

Do not get the impression that I think you should avoid Rev, not the 
case. I like it a lot and I plan to keep using Rev for new internal use 
projects instead of Hypercard. But there are aspects of Hypercard that 
I miss.

Kee Nethery