Helping newcomers anticipate that standalones can't save to themselves

[Bob Sneidar]

Okay, so let’s remember that a Dev Environment is an order of magnitude (or more) more complex that simply running an application. It’s an application that builds applications, for crying out loud, and people who take up software development need to get used to the idea that they are going to *have to* study up on the product. Try getting into Java or C without reading the documentation. 

Someone said that executables can modify themselves. Erm… no they cannot. If they can, then so can malware. Modern OS’es prevent this, and the very nature of an executable (and I mean the *actual* executable, not the package that contains it) will prevent this. Since the mainstack is compiled with the runtime engine to form the executable, well, that as they say, is that. 

C++ executables cannot modify themselves once compiled. They can modify other support files, but not themselves directly. I don’t understand why people expect Livecode to be different. 

All that being said, it *would* be nice to have an emulator that I can switch to so I can see how it will run on my Mac without having to switch to my Virtual Machine and run it in Livecode there. But that is because I am lazy. It’s not that much more trouble to bite the bullet and buy the VM software. 

As far as the documentation, that can always be improved. 

Bob S