FORTH and Hypercard

[J. Landman Gay]

simplsol at aol.com wrote:
> Jacque,
> I wonder if Scott would come to the same conclusion today.
>  On modern computers messages can transverse the entire path in 
> nanoseconds.

True, though knowing Scott Raney he wouldn't change it even now. 
However, the reason I changed my mind about the theoretical problem was 
that I couldn't think of any good reasons why I needed the behavior. I 
was used to it in HyperCard, of course, and it came in handy when I was 
trying to fix other people's stacks. But when I really thought about it, 
there wasn't any good reason to override command behaviors in my own 
work. It was just as easy to write a handler with its own name and call 
that.

The only time I really wanted override behavior was to fix a client 
stack that came to me with a "play" command on every one of about 500 
cards. The stack would play irritating sound effects on every user 
action and it was driving the client nuts. They wanted me to remove the 
sounds. In HyperCard I could have overridden the behavior with a single 
"play" handler at the stack level, but as it was I needed to go through 
all the cards and remove the commands from each one.

But if I was writing my own stack, I would have just created a single 
handler at the stack level to begin with, which would be easy to change. 
So, aside from fixing other people's bad code, I couldn't think of any 
reason to ask for the behavior.

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