the visible of a stack

[Richmond Mathewson]

May be I'm being a bit goofy, but I just made a stack called "POO" and put the following commands/messages into the message box:

1.  put the vis of stack "POO" 

    which yielded 'true'

2. set the vis of stack "POO" to false

3. put the vis of stack "POO" 

   which yielded 'false'

4. set the vis of stack "POO" to true

    which yielded 'true'

not strictly rocket science !

I then tried this:

5. move stack "POO" to -1000,-1000

and it sedately moved off-screen

4. put the vis of stack "POO"

    which yielded 'true' [obviously]

although I could not see the stack.

So I concluded, with my philosophical hat jammed well down over my eyes,
that VIS has nothing to do with whether I can see the stack or not, but has something to do with one of the properties of an object.

Of course this confusion is one of the side-effects of using a programming language which resembles natural language in some respects. Had the language been written so that VIS referred to both the object's opacity being either 100% or 0% and/or whether it was within a bounding rectangle (whether computer screen or containing object) that confusion would not have arisen, as that is closer to the way 'visible' is defined in the English language.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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