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From: dudek@utai.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: multifinder queries & HyperCard annoyances
Message-ID: <4060@utai.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Sep-87 13:12:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: utai.4060
Posted: Thu Sep 10 13:12:56 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 03:53:59 EDT
References: <809@newton.physics.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: dudek@ai.UUCP (Gregory Dudek)
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 36
Keywords: HyperCard
Summary: 


    Having played around with MultiFinder and Hypercard a little, I have a
few questions and some wishes for HC.

    Under MultiFinder, 
	Does anybody know how you can tell you're running in this environment?
I presume that the switcher globals are still used, but how do you know
you're not under switcher or servant?  You could check out the name of the
application running the show, but that would hardly be robust.

	If you do a sublaunch, I thought this adds another partition
with the new program in it.  Presumably your program exits at this
point as it used to?  Is there a way to fork off a new partition and
application WITHOUT closing the current application?

    ----

    Playing around with HC scripts a bit, I get the feeling the script
language could use a little more string manipulation power.  In particular,
it seems like it could really use some simple regular expression
matching.  
    Even simpler, it would be nice to be able to test whether an
argument is numeric so you can decide how to handle it.  Ain't there any
way to do this simple thing without resorting to absolute brute force??
   (brute force: got any 0s?, got any 1s, got any 2s, ....)

   Ideally, I guess it would be nice if it had the power of ICON or SNOBOL
or something, but maybe that's being unreasonable.

   Greg Dudek
-- 
Dept. of Computer Science (vision group)    University of Toronto
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Paper mail: Dept. of Comp Sci, Univ of Toronto, Toronto, Canada