Revolution back to HyperCard

[Richard Gaskin]

Timothy Miller wrote:
> Sorry, Richard, I probably don't completely understand your question.
> 
> I'd guess you were once a HC user, but maybe not. SS stands for 
> searchscript. It was a script that shipped with hyperCard, in the home 
> stack. It was invoked by typing SS into the msg box. It searched for a 
> string in every script in the top stack.
> 
> You asked about "each of these scripts." That's the part of your 
> question I didn't understand.
> 
> FWIW, I was comparing the speed of Rev's Find stack, searching for a 
> string in any script in the top stack versus hyperCard's SearchScript 
> doing the same job in a similar stack, in classic mode. But you probably 
> understood that part.
> 
> Beyond that, I once wrote a test script comparing the milliseconds at 
> beginning and end of script, the "find" command in a repeat loop, to 
> find every instance of a string in any field of a rather large stack. I 
> compared the elapsed time to the time Rev's "Find" stack took to do the 
> same job, in the same stack, searching for field text only. I reported 
> the whole thing on the list 2 or 3 months ago.
> 
> As I recall, the "find" command was 59 times faster than the 
> field-text-only find, using Rev's "Find" stack. It was easy to calculate 
> because the script took less than two seconds, whereas the "Find" stack 
> needed more than a minute to do the same job.
> 
> Maybe that's what you were asking about. Not sure.

It seems you understood my question well in spite of my vaguery.  :)

Rev is generally faster than HC with the exception of certain uses of 
"find" (thanks to Atkinson's patented 'hint bits'), so I'd be curious to 
read an analysis of why the two search solutions are so very different.

I haven't used SS before, and am not even sure if I still have HC 
installed on this machine.  I don't use the Rev IDE either, but at least 
I do have it around somewhere and could dig out the search window.

With SS, what does the result give you?  Does it produce a list of found 
objects, or take you to them sequentially?

I'm pretty confident Rev can deliver a search solution that performs 
roughly on par with HC overall, esp. if we're talking about just 
searching scripts rather than fields, as I believe "hint bits" only 
apply to field objects.

Maybe I can squeeze some time to sit down with those two scripts and 
figure out where the time is being spent....

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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