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From: jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Hypercard 2.0
Message-ID: <47854@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 8 Jan 91 04:18:53 GMT
References: <12208@pucc.Princeton.EDU> <47827@apple.Apple.COM> <12209@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 64


In article <12209@pucc.Princeton.EDU> EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU
(Ed Nilges) writes:
>>        ...the reason you can't open converted stacks with HyperCard 1.x
>>is that the file format has changed to include new information

>You could have done this such that the format was upward compatible:
>such that stacks would work with 2.0 and older releases, as long as
>they did not explicitly require the new features.  You chose not to,
>and I feel that marketing considerations played a role in your decision.
>Either the pre-2.0 stack format did not accomodate expansion, which
>was a bad decision at that time, or else the 2.0 stack format did not
>take advantage of expansion capability...which is a bad decision NOW.

Marketing played no role in this decision.  The 1.x stack format did
not accommodate expansion.

But let's not be too hard on its designer.  He got a lot of other things
right.

>                                   I did say that 2.0 is slower.  That
>has been my consistent experience on a 68020 platform.  Have you tried
>Hypercard on such a slightly older platform?

Yes, I use HyperCard 2.0 regularly on 68000, 68020, and 68030 Macintoshes.
It's part of my job.

>                         I am sitting here with a DayTimer stack of
>my own devising [...] that has effectively been trashed by Hypercard
>2.0.  It is in 2.0 format, I cannot convert it back to 1.x format [...],
>it runs a LOT slower because it does a lot of text editing, and I use a
>shared copy of Hypercard 2.0 on a file server that is not always
>available.

>My stacks consist of a lot of functions running on top of Hypercard
>string manipulation...things like "getPhrase" to get word n thru m
>from a string, and so on.

There's a bug in 2.0, fixed in 2.0v2, which makes evaluating "word x to
y of <expr>" and "char x to y of <expr>" much slower than it should be.
You would benefit quite a lot from getting your own copy of HyperCard
2.0v2 -- evaluating such expressions in 2.0v2 is faster than it was in
1.x.  And if you had 2.0v2, you wouldn't have to put up with the inherent
sluggishness of running the application off of the server.

BTW, having this bug in 2.0 wasn't a marketing decision, either.  :-)
It was an engineering omission. :-(

>                                                      I found that
>"go to it", for example, works differently when "it" contains "card
>id nnnnn".

>Where's my Hypercard compiler?

It's in HyperCard, and it's responsible for the slowdown in commands
such as "go to it".  You can imagine the horror of trying to compile
a command of this type.  Not very specific at compile time, is it?

The 2.0 HyperTalk compiler, overall, speeds up the execution of 1.0
scripts.  Naturally, there are tradeoffs, and "go to it" is one of them.

Kevin Calhoun
HyperCard Team
Apple Computer, Inc.