ba0k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Brian Patrick Arnold) (02/20/90)
Thanks for everyone who responded to my informal survey. The results of my survey are somewhat revealing. 11 people responded: 10 Yup Use names for reasons other than storing name identifiers 2 Nope Avoid names like the plague except as name identifiers One person voted twice. Although all responders had good reasons for doing what they're doing, I think two that stand out succinctly are: On the Yup Side (Jim Taylor): "It's a wonderful way to make scripts more generic, and it generally seems to accomplish things much faster than other methods." On the Nope Side (Les Carr): "Any other shenannigans goes on in background fields!" I think that what we can conclude is that HyperCard doesn't provide adequate attribute or "instance variable" storage of data, and that most people find the most convenient place to store such data is in names of objects. Most people have learned and expressed grief that this method presents problems regarding uniqueness of names, the character limit, and the need to perform time-consuming hacks in order to maintain the illusion of data storage via object names. Here's wishing for 2.0. - Brian