Parser

[J. Landman Gay]

Mikey wrote:

> As for "getting used to it", I've been developing in HC since (almost)
> day 1, which was just about 20 years ago, and I still have multiple
> production systems running on old Quadras that still use it, so I am
> working in it frequently.
> 
> However, since I have a new fascination with the potential ability to
> hack (and therefore fix some of the things in) RR, the quirks and
> annoyances of it lead me to ask these sorts of questions.

I've thought for a long time that the people who have the hardest time 
converting over to Revolution are old HC users. Folks who come from 
other backgrounds expect to relearn a lot of stuff. But Rev is so very 
similar to HC in so many ways, that the few things that are different 
make us HC converts very frustrated. We have an unlearning curve. It 
took me months to get over it, because things that I thought should work 
would *almost* work, but they worked a little differently.

But once you get past the unlearning curve, you do start to appreciate 
Rev and eventually you start to realize that if you'd written the engine 
yourself, you might have done it the same way in a lot of cases. For 
example, if  you leave off the "the"s for properties, the engine has to 
do more work to parse out what you mean. HC was much slower than Rev, 
and a lot of that was due to the forgiving nature of HC's interpreter. 
Rev is less forgiving, but very much faster.

Unquoted literals are another one. HC would accept almost anything as an 
unquoted literal and that slowed it down a lot. Rev isn't so nice about 
it. There are some situations where an unquoted literal will work fine, 
but in general it's a lot more picky about those. The increase in speed 
is the reward.

You'll hit some roadblocks and get mad, but there is only one unlearning 
curve and it only takes a little while.

Regarding hacking the IDE: I'd advise against it. It's a tightly 
integrated system. A better way to implement what you want to do is to 
write your own stack and put the handlers in it that you want to use. 
Then pop your stack into the Plugins folder and set it to activate when 
Rev starts up (the list can help with that if you don't know how.) I did 
that with all the HC Home stack scripts that I wanted to move over to 
Rev. I didn't move them all though. For example, I didn't move the 
message box shortcuts to get into the property inspector, since Rev 
provides multiple ways to open an inspector. But I did move most of my 
custom Home scripts into a plugin where they work just as they did in HC.

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