A Text file format for LiveCode

[Mark Wilcox]

Personally I think there may be some value in having the default developer view of a stack as a set of (mostly) text files. There would then be a tool that does a lot of what lcVCS does which turns that into a binary stack format for runtime size and performance - a lot of languages "compile" things in that way.

However, note that the "Live" part of LiveCode is made faster by this almost direct manipulation of the binary that the engine interprets rather than having an intermediate step.

So, if the lcVCS route can be made to work robustly then optimising for coding rather than optimising for serialising for version control seems like a pretty good tradeoff.

Mark


________________________________
 From: David Bovill <david at scimatch.org>
To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> 
Sent: Monday, 7 October 2013, 14:18
Subject: Re: A Text file format for LiveCode
 

On 6 October 2013 23:46, Monte Goulding <monte at sweattechnologies.com> wrote:

>
> On 07/10/2013, at 8:52 AM, Dr. Hawkins <dochawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The format is probably pretty obvious, too . . .
> >
> > begin button myBtn
> >  owner: card buttonville of stack buttonland
> >  type: pushbutton
> >  label: "My Favorite button"
> >  loc:   823, 445
> >  width:  92
> >  height: 39
> >
> >  script:
> >     on mouseup
> >         do something awesome
> >     end mouseup
> >
> > end button myBtn
>
> How would you represent multi-dimensional properties in this format?
>

You can use folders. I structure things as follows - toplevel we have an
array based representation of stacks, under which you can choose to export
this to either XML, JSON or my preferred representation text and folder
based.

These don;t get around the problems Monte points out - but an established
practice of using handers to define a default state which is triggered on
each save / export to vcs works though it is time consuming to create each
handler - better is to avoid using those features in stacks.

Monte - I thought there was some new stuff in the developer releases for
creating IDs of the sort you advocate? Can you update us?
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