files, names and files

[Timothy Miller]

Good afternoon,

I feel kind of bad about asking so many semi-newbie questions, but 
I'm not quite sure how else to find stuff out. The onboard 
documentation is sometimes helpful. Often it's sparse and/or cryptic, 
it seems to me. I hope that improves. I have Dan Shafer's book. 
Sometimes it helps, of course, but not always. I wonder if a separate 
list for novices has been considered. Much of the discussion here is 
way over my head.

Are there other good resources I'm overlooking?

But that's not why I called.

Would someone be so kind as to explain the technical and practical 
distinctions between

--The Name of a stack

--The Title of a stack

--The name of the stack as it appears on the hard disk

--The name of a stack specified in the stackfiles

--The filename of a stack specified in the stackfiles

(I have the general idea about filenames as in "get the filename of 
stack "abc" So that explanation might not be needed.)

It's probably not all that hard, *after* you understand it. *Before* 
one understands it, it's rather perplexing. (I don't think we're in 
hyperCard anymore, Toto.)

(BTW, as far as I can tell, the stackFiles are a multi-line property, 
which the user can set or get by script or with the multi-line 
message box. Correct?)

This came up because I wanted to open a stack, and an archived 
version of the same stack (in another folder) at the same time, just 
to look -- not for the sake of scripting interaction between the two.

Silly me. I thought it would suffice just to alter the name of the 
archived stack as it appears on the hard disk. That clearly doesn't 
work.

Presumably, if I understand the things I asked about above, I'll 
figure out how to do that when I need to. If there's a quick trick to 
this, I'd like to know it. (Both stacks have the same stackfiles. I'd 
guess I'll have to modify the stackfiles in the archived stack to 
open it at the same time as the other.)

Thanks in advance, again,


Tim Miller