All this talk about DataBases

[Dave Cragg]

On 30 May 2007, at 04:57, Joe Lewis Wilkins wrote:

> Jesse,
>
> In case you don't know. HyperCard was written by a genius in  
> assembly language. Here I'm going to make an assumption (with all  
> of the known dangers of doing so), Rev was written by a "good"  
> programmer; probably in a high or higher level language. Big  
> difference. Then Rev has to do so much more as well.

You're courting controversy here, Joe. :-)

As others have mentioned, Metacard was written to be RAM-based. One  
advantage is that most things are much faster than Hypercard. The  
downside is that for large data storage, some kind of external  
storage is needed.

One of the first tasks I ever tried to do in Hypercard was create a  
"word frequency" routine that counted the number of occurrences of  
separate words in a large text file. (1MB +) It was so slow that I  
took the trouble to learn C so that I could make an external. Years  
later, when I first used Metacard, I could use the "repeat for each"  
routine to do it as fast as the external. I know who I thought was  
the genius at the time. :-)

Cheers
Dave