All this talk about DataBases

[Joe Lewis Wilkins]

Hey Dave,

My first comment when I started this thread was "another great  
controversy" (smile). No question but what HC had its limitations.  
Without CompileIt I would have been real discouraged back then; but  
as the machines got faster, particularly with my externals written in  
native HyperTalk and compiled with CompileIt, I was able to do some  
pretty great things. At least my clients were happy. (most of the  
time). These really weren't the issues that I hoped would - and DID -  
surface on this great list. I'd try a summary at this point, but  
doubt that I would do most of it real justice. AND if I just had the  
time. Besides, Richard did a pretty darned good job of that already.

Thanks to each and everyone of you who contributed to this Q&A about  
Data Bases. I think it has been very valuable; whether or not it has  
changed any minds.  It has certainly given me some ideas and  
approaches that would not have had otherwise. Fortunately, for the  
kinds of things I, personally, will be doing, I will find Rev's  
capabilities more than adequate, as will most of Rev's users.

Joe Wilkins


On May 30, 2007, at 8:42 AM, Dave Cragg wrote:

>
> On 30 May 2007, at 04:57, Joe Lewis Wilkins wrote:
>
>> Jesse,
>>
>> In case you don't know. HyperCard was written by a genius in  
>> assembly language. Here I'm going to make an assumption (with all  
>> of the known dangers of doing so), Rev was written by a "good"  
>> programmer; probably in a high or higher level language. Big  
>> difference. Then Rev has to do so much more as well.
>
> You're courting controversy here, Joe. :-)
>
> As others have mentioned, Metacard was written to be RAM-based. One  
> advantage is that most things are much faster than Hypercard. The  
> downside is that for large data storage, some kind of external  
> storage is needed.
>
> One of the first tasks I ever tried to do in Hypercard was create a  
> "word frequency" routine that counted the number of occurrences of  
> separate words in a large text file. (1MB +) It was so slow that I  
> took the trouble to learn C so that I could make an external. Years  
> later, when I first used Metacard, I could use the "repeat for  
> each" routine to do it as fast as the external. I know who I  
> thought was the genius at the time. :-)
>
> Cheers
> Dave
>
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