Converting Hypercard Stack -- How big is your headache?

Richmond Mathewson geradamas at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 24 15:29:31 EST 2008


Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote:

"I suspect there are very few people who are still importing these 
old HC stacks."

No, I have given up.

I do have a fairly large repository of HC stacks; mine, partly mine, 
and from other people. At least some of them contain good stuff. 
I am constantly "mining my own past"; not having a particularly great 
urge to have to reinvent the wheel several times over.

However, similar to my previous posting advising people to build 
standalones inside the target operating system 
(fell foul of that one last week: stupid, really, didn't 
listen to my own advice);

I find that it is far better to crack open an HC stack (do this on
my dedicated Mac OS 9 G3 DV, right next to the monitors of the G4), and
then duplicate/copy/rewrite in Runtime Revolution, rather than attempt conversion. This has some advantages:

1. I generally realise how awful my xTalk coding was 15 years ago; 
so can prune, trim, and generally improve the whole thing as I go along.

2. The script-editor traps any HC code that RunRev feels funny about; so
can modify it there and then.

3. I don't end up with a "half-cock job" of a conversion and have to spend
far longer than I do retyping it trying to track down what's wrong.

It is true that Runtime Revolution can:

Build standalones for other OSes than the one it is currently running on,

and

Convert Hypercard stacks.

However, this reminds me of a type of work I do all the time: 
"style-editing" translations from Bulgarian into English - and, by gum,
some of those texts take a lot of "style-editing"; in fact the boundary between what constitutes style-editing and rewriting, and even, retranslating becomes increasingly fuzzy and hard to define. Normally,
I refuse this type of work unless the translation has been done by my wife
whose English is really fantastic - but then, whether she is ONLY translating, rather than REWRITING as she translates is a moot point.

I am also, essentially lazy, and would far rather retype a program; tightening up the "nuts and bolts" as I go, than foist on some unsuspecting end-user a "quick-and-XXXXXy" conversion; and then have the sort of back-and-forth arguments, misunderstandings and so on that accompany bad work.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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