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From: kurtzman@pollux.usc.edu (Stephen Kurtzman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: hypercard thoughts
Message-ID: <4966@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: Sun, 1-Nov-87 18:00:31 EST
Article-I.D.: oberon.4966
Posted: Sun Nov  1 18:00:31 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Nov-87 21:31:15 EST
References: <2014@umd5.umd.edu> <4911@oberon.USC.EDU> <2017@umd5.umd.edu>
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Reply-To: kurtzman@pollux.usc.edu (Stephen Kurtzman)
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In article <2017@umd5.umd.edu> zben@umd5 (Ben Cranston) writes:
>My tenative conclusion is that if one issues a "find ... in field fff" and
>there is no "fff" field on the current card or background then the find
>command is silently mutated into a "find ..." command and then searches all
>fields of all cards.  At least that seems consistant with what I see...

It would also be consistent with the tendency of hypertext to "correct" errors
behind your back. This tendency is a major loss in the design of hypertext as
your example illustrates. I have found other instances where either poor
performance or non-intuitive results occur due to a mistake on my part and
hypertext's "forgiving" attitude. One of these almost caused me to abandon
hypercard as unusable: I had a series of commands that refered to the unquoted
names of fields rather than field numbers. Apparently, hypertext was parsing
the field names as variable names,
and when it found no variables (or perhaps empty variables)
it would guess at what I wanted and successfully perform some operation that
gave me the result I wanted. The problem was it took way to long. When I
converted all the (unquoted) field names to field numbers I got a tenfold
performance improvement. Don't ask me what hypertext was doing -- I don't know.

>
>Also, now that I have a fully populated version to play with, I'm struck
>with the poor performance.  A simple 
>
>   find "850911" in field "ShowDate"
>
>takes between 45 seconds and a minute to find the appropriate card.

I have found the find command to be amazingly quick. 45 seconds sounds
outrageous. Does anyone know why Ben is getting such horrid performance?
As my stacks grow should I expect such rotten performance?