Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!uva!borton
From: borton@uva.UUCP (Chris Borton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: on idle "backgrounding" & switch{}/CASE
Message-ID: <570@uva.UUCP>
Date: 18 Nov 88 17:33:23 GMT
Reply-To: borton@uva.UUCP (Chris Borton)
Organization: Faculteit Wiskunde & Informatica, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Lines: 32

Scenario: I've got one stack full of information cards on various
geographical locations in different fields.  A different stack, "Tester" goes
to the "Geography" stack and pulls pairs of fields at random to make a
match-the-pairs test.  Currently I have this done all at once via a button.

The complaint from the students is that this takes awhile.  I agree, and have
optimized it as much as I can, I think.  However, ideally I'd like to do the
whole process 'in the background' while they are busy thinking about the
current test.

I don't think this would be too hard, using an 'on idle' handler, but my
question is how to best implement it.  My initial thought is the have the
idler increment a variable and call a function with that variable, which
would tell it what to do.

Breaking the test-building process into chunks and doing them according to
the number passed seems fine; where the problem comes in is how to deal with
the number coming in and what to do--a CASE statement in Pascal, switch{} in C.

As far as I can tell, there is no clean way to do this in HyperTalk other
than ungainly masses of if/then levels.  If there is no better way, then I'll
probably end up doing that at several levels.  But I'd rather not.

Can anyone shed light on this?  Better solutions?

Thanks...

-cbb
-- 
Chris Borton	borton%uva@mcvax.{nl,bitnet,uucp} 
Rotary Scholar, University of Amsterdam CS
Now Palestine is a virtual country.  But what gets swapped out on page-fault?