Chunk order must be small to large

[J. Landman Gay]

Richard Gaskin wrote:

>   It may be tempting to want to implement some custom behavior for,
>   say, the truncate function.  Raney felt that all that did is risk
>   confusing anyone who calls that function while your handler is in
>   the message path, so in his view it didn't merely expode the size
>   of the token table, it polluted it.
> 
> 
> I went to the mat with him over this one years ago when I was porting an 
> HC project.  He said, "If you need a custom behavior, use a custom 
> name."  I said, "But I *need* to override the built-in function!" and he 
> asked simply, "'Need'? Why?"  I couldn't think of a truly necessary case.

I heckled him about the same thing once. I really did have a necessary 
case, but it was a one-time event.

I was converting a HC stack for a client. The original author had added 
sound effects to every action, hundreds and hundreds of them, throughout 
the stack. It was a business stack. Every time the office worker used 
it, they had to turn off the sound on the computer or else the squeaks 
and beeps and plonks and tweets drove everyone nuts. They wanted me to 
take out the sounds, which I fully agreed with.

It would have been *so* easy to write a single "play" trap handler in 
the stack script. But I couldn't do it, I had to search through 
thousands of lines of code in hundreds of cards and remove each 
instance. Blech.

But I've never needed to override the engine in anything I've written 
myself. I've only needed it in self-defense of others.

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