howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman) (02/27/88)
In article <43182@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: >What you're saying, Mr. Webber, is because it would be more convenient for >YOU to see this stuff as component pieces, you want all the HyperCard >writers in the world to: >o disassemble their program into component parts >o write instructions on the re-assembly of same >o post component parts to the net. What's wrong with stacks that disassemble themselves? >All so, if you feel like it, you can take a look at it and say "that's nice. >Too bad Unix doesn't do this sort of stuff". No. >Then, you expect the readers to: >o download each component part >o read the instructions >o put it all back together >o get it right What's wrong with stacks that reassemble themselves? >You completely ignore the fact that many of these stacks (for instance, the >esperanto stack) are filled with data. So, you could add the stpes of >figuring out how to export all the data, format it for packaging, and import >it back into the stack, all without munging the data. Yes, that's the better way. >All so you can look at it and say 'that's nice.' No. >Webber, you're insane. Or simply selfish and stupid. I'm not sure which. >hyperCArd stacks are written for HyperCard, not for your specious enjoyment. >If you want to play with them, buy a Mac. but don't suggest that the mac >folks should go out of their way to make their software useless for everyone >simply because it doesn't fit your reality. Your reality is skewed and >selfish. Get off the "madness and badness" kick, Chuq. Webber is not insane, he's just frustrated at watching megabytes of data flow by in a format that's utterly useless to him, when a little attention might have made it otherwise. Many stacks *DO* contain large amounts of data which could be transmitted differently. I recently decided to post a HyperCard stack of Go game references. The main people who would want this are all on rec.games.go. Should I clutter up comp.sys.mac.hypercard with this? Posting the stack would have been > 250 KB (not allowing for stuffit compression). Instead, I spent a few hours writing and testing a script to dump all the fields to a UNIX text file, posted THAT to rec.games.go with a pointer in the hypercard group, and began preparing to post the EMPTY stack (about 24 KB uncompressed) on comp.sys.mac.hypercard. This makes much more sense. It *WAS* more work for me, no question about it, but the number of people who can use the data is now at least 10 times greater. I saw that as valuable. (For those who are anxiously awaiting the stack itself, which is a nice simple example of how to dump/restore the bulk of a mostly-text stack to a file, you may have to wait for a while. It seems that the HyperTalk command: read from file f until newline simply DOESN'T WORK. It merrily scans right past a newline and stops 10 or so characters later in the middle of a word. Loads of fun. It may take me a while to work around this.) Note that, *IF* I ever get this to work, all the user need to do is get the stack and the text file onto his mac and push the "Text to stack" button. Not quite as bad as you make it out to be. The script even counts errors and reports them, so you know whether everything went O.K. or not. -- Howard A. Landman {oliveb,hplabs}!intelca!mipos3!cpocd2!howard howard%cpocd2.intel.com@RELAY.CS.NET