Goodbye stsMLXEditor

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Wieder wrote:
> On 09/02/2015 05:43 AM, Kay C Lan wrote:
>
>>> You don't think you're being a bit over dramatic?
>
> Who? Me? lol.
>
> Seriously, though... here's a case in point.
>
> When I first released PowerDebug it was wide open as far a catching any
> problems. Soon users started reporting that they were seeing weird
> system errors with PowerDebug in the system but were not seeing them
> without it. And naturally they would blame PowerDebug for the errors,
> and this makes sense as a root cause - remove PD and things work again.
> So I had to dumb things down a bit in the next release in order to avoid
> the IDE stack errors.

But were they true logic errors or simply compilation errors thrown by 
undeclared variables?  If the former we would expect them to show up 
even after PD is removed, no?

A little background may be amusing if not useful:

The explicitVars property was adopted by Dr. Raney from SuperCard, where 
it required an expensive rewrite of SC's Runtime Editor to accommodate 
it, and a community-wide rewrite of all libraries as well.  Some 
community libraries were updated, some not, resulting in a mixed world 
of compatibility issues in which this new global property could only be 
relied on if you limited your use of other people's code because every 
other script in play would be affected by it.

After all, one of the defining characteristics of xTalks is that they 
declare and coerce variables dynamically, a freedom still enjoyed by many.

I asked the SuperCard engineer who implemented it why he did so, since 
no customer nor anyone on the team had ever requested it.  He said, "It 
enforces discipline".  Indeed it does.  I believe it's relevant to note 
that after leaving the SuperCard project that engineer went on to write 
device drivers, and for all his excellent C skills he once told me he 
not only never used any scripting language for anything but testing what 
he'd written in C, but he didn't even like them.

Discipline is often a good thing, but a scripting engine is not a 
dominatrix.  LiveCode's temporal application of explicitVars at 
compile-time only is IMO a good middle path, allowing it to be useful 
for one's own work when preferred but still allowing others to write 
according to their own preferences as well.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com