Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!amdahl!apple!dan
From: dan@Apple.COM (Dan Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: A good book for desscribing nitty gritty of XCMDs and language use
Message-ID: <10899@apple.Apple.Com>
Date: 23 May 88 05:36:17 GMT
References: <50895@sun.uucp> <4015@zodiac.UUCP>
Reply-To: dan@apple.UUCP (Dan Allen)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 23

There is no REALLY good book on XCMD writing.  The best current source
is APDA.  There is a disk with some sample XCMDs in C and Pascal with a
bit of brief on-disk documentation.  There is also the "HyperCard Script
Language Reference Manual" which has an appendix on XCMDs.  There will
be a new version of this manual in book form by Addison-Wesley later
this year (late summer, early fall) which will have some improved
material.

There will be an article in a special Dr. Dobb's Macintosh Issue coming
out on newstands sometime in mid June about writing XCMDs which I wrote,
so I will not comment more at this time.

As far as C verses Pascal and XCMDs, MPW Pascal has the advantage over
MPW C that strings and the like are not global data, but are in C.
HyperCard itself is written in Pascal, for what that's worth, but XCMDs
in C seem to work fine.  The Dr. Dobb's article I wrote uses C because
of its apparent popularity these days.

Hope this helps some.

Dan Allen
Software Explorer
Apple Computer