Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!psuvm.bitnet!gfx
From: GFX@PSUVM.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: HyperTalk efficiency
Message-ID: <45601GFX@PSUVM>
Date: 20 Jun 88 05:02:49 GMT
Organization: The Pennsylvania State University - Computation Center
Lines: 42

In article <4348@csli.STANFORD.EDU>, nash@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Ron Nash) says:
>
>As anyone who's tried to write a decent-sized hypercard application
>knows so well: by the time you build in a reasonable amount of
>error checking, the whole thing runs so damn slow -- especially a
>multi-stack program on a Mac+ -- that you wonder whether it's all
>worthwhile. [...]
>

I could not agree more with this statement.  Now, being a somewhat
"naive" user, I often wonders if future releases of Hypercard could
generate their own XCMDs, that is, compile those scripts that take
forever to execute.  Hypercard provides a wonderful front end for
week-ends scripters like me, but if you do not fully understand the
exquisite architecture of XCMDs, meaningful applications are simply
too slow to be useful.

For example, I wrote scripts to perform various statistical analyses
(variance, correlations, multiple regression, etc.) which reside in
the home stack.  Would it not be possible for someone to come up
with a general XCMD that would transform these scripts in XFCNs?
Or could someone tell me why this would not be feasible?

For the sake of the discussion, I think that the question must
distinguish two kinds of external resources: a) those that rely
strictly on HyperText syntax, and whose purpose is to speed things
up (Eg SortXFCN could have been written in HyperText), and b) those
that expand HyperText (Eg GetCreator, FileNamePlus, etc.)

I have the feeling that a program generator for the first type of
resources is not beyond the realm of the short term possibilities,
while the second (which could compile Pascal code directly into
an XCMD-XFCN) may require much more thought and effort.

I, for one, know that I would be willing to invest in a program
generator of the first kind.  Is there someone out there working
on that? Is this feasible?
-------

Stephane Gauvin : GFX@PSUVM : (814) 237-4979 : Compuserve 73057,1763
Interests: Marketing: New products, Mathematical Models, Game Theory
           Computing: AI, MacIntosh, Hypercard