[comp.sys.mac.hypercard] visual effects and XCMDs

alibaba@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Alexander M. Rosenberg) (05/16/88)

Bad, bad, bad, bad Apple! <Slap!>

I caught them being silly again.

I was spening the better part of my early morning figuring out how to parse
the arguments to an XCMD, such that I would be imitating one of the existing
commands, as such:

visual effect wipe diagonal slowly to black

No go. I spent about a hour figuring the best way to handle the many optional
arguments, and I declared it ready to test, and bang!

Arguments to XCMDs must be seperated by commas, unless only one argument is
used. Therefore, there is no point in my trying to imitate the calling
structure of the command 'visual', as it will not take its arguments seperated
by commas.

As you may have guessed, this is unfortunate for a command such as mine,
which must now look like a hack, instead of a classy interweaving into
the HyperTalk language. Since Apple promised that HyperTalk will not change,
then the error has been made, and the world must live in darkness. Of course,
Dan and Bill could find a way to allow commands to be space delineated, and
call it XCM2 and XFC2 or somesuch. :-)

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