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From: lim@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Kian-Tat Lim)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,news.groups
Subject: Re: Call for votes: comp.binaries.hypercard
Message-ID: <5534@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 23 Feb 88 11:27:27 GMT
References: <454@stech.UUCP> <960@athos.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: lim@cit-vax.UUCP (Kian-Tat Lim)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 58
Summary: Ascii HyperCard is an oxymoron

In article <960@athos.rutgers.edu> webber@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes:
>By promoting ascii-readable hypercard stacks (databases), it becomes easier
>for people to write awk scripts for processing stacks on normal unix systems.

If you knew much about HyperCard, you would realize that the foundation of the
program is its graphics capability.  In particular, each card contains two
full-screen (-window for Mac II's) bitmap planes.  It is simply not efficient
to convert this to an "ascii-readable" form, and without the graphics,
the stack is essentially useless.  HyperCard is most emphatically *not* a
simple database (although it may be used as such), and the idea of processing
a stack with an awk script is almost ludicrous (since interactivity and an
event-driven programming style is also a HyperCard fundamental).

It might be possible to create a format which would include the stack contents
in a transportable (though probably not ASCII) way; this might allow stacks to
be ported to an Amiga or Atari ST or Sun workstation.  Of course, this would
require an implementation of HyperTalk and probably all of HyperCard on the
foreign system, certainly a non-trivial task.

>... If hypercard is any
>good, its stacks will be of interest to many people other than mac owners
>(and if not, mac owners will also quickly tire of it).

I'm sure that HyperCard stacks will be of interest to non-Mac-owners; Apple's
intention is surely to sell more Mac hardware once people see what can be done
with it.  Note that your statement doesn't necessarily imply that
non-Mac-owners will be able to use HyperCard stacks on their machine or that
they need to be able to; rather, I foresee people saying, "Gosh, I wish I had
bought a Macintosh so I could use this stuff!"  (Sorry for the pro-Mac bias.)
As a parallel, I know some people who think Suntools is the greatest thing
since sliced bread (and not all of them are Sun owners/users).  Does this mean
that non-Sun-users should/do have Suntool emulators on their machine?

>[Note: there are also people posting stacks that contain non-hypercard code
>as a hybrid system.  Considering the size of the Hypercard manual, if most
>people find it necessary to augment the system to make something useful,
>that too says something about hypercard.]

On the positive side, it says that the HyperCard designers were humble enough
to realize that they couldn't think of all the possible applications it could
be used in, so they provided a relatively easy-to-use method of extending the
HyperTalk language that is transparent to the end-user.  On the negative side,
it says that they left out a few features exemplified by the most-commonly-used
additions (XCMDs and XFCNs).

Note that the HyperCard User's Manual is actually quite small.  I imagine you
are referring to one of the various HyperTalk books; as far as I can see, the
primary reason for their length is that not only are they describing a complete
new language, but also they must teach message-based programming to a generally
sequential-thinking, procedure-based world of programmers.

>By the way, those of you who read comp.risks are already aware of the
>viruses that have already appeared in some hypercard stacks.

Those of you who read comp.risks are also aware of the viruses that have
appeared in IBM PC executables; should we discontinue posting of those, also?

-- Kian-Tat Lim (ktl@wagvax.caltech.edu, GEnie: K.LIM1)