Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!ba0k+ From: ba0k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Brian Patrick Arnold) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard Subject: Re: Are long card names legal? Message-ID: Date: 15 Feb 90 00:02:53 GMT References: <12566361650019@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu> Organization: Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 54 In-Reply-To: <12566361650019@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu> Mr. Talley writes (abbrev): >you can set the name of a card to some fairly long strs (>30 chars), >but the "go" command fails for cards with names longer than 29 chars. It applies to all HyperCard objects. I first noticed this problem when trying to reference a button with a very long name in a handler. That handler was just trying to name the button by a string and then reference it by name. That was fun to debug. "Never heard of button named" by the name it was freshly given. Sonova...frickin.... INFORMAL POLL ---- E-Mail me your vote "yup" if you like to exploit names of HC objects. Who tends to use the name of an object for reasons such as matching names of buttons to cards etc., or to hold other navigational or otherwise bizarre pieces of information? How successful have you been? E-Mail me your vote "nope" if you avoid names like the plague. Who steers clear of dependance on the name as a place to store things and especially as a way to reference HC objects and in navigation? ---- If more than 10 people respond, I will summarize the results. It seems to me that it's really easy to try to "store" non-trivial information in name fields that comes back to haunt developers of reasonably large stacks. I blame this on the fact that developers can't assign attributes of their own to HC objects without smoke and mirrors. For example, I tried to use the button name to hold the name of a "model" card concatenated with the name of a "variable" card which were cards in different bkgnds. I feared that with 100's of btns and cards, indirection through storage of names in bkgnd field lists would be "slow" (relative term). It works as long as the net string length is under 29 chars. I just want to confirm whether I've been a dorky programmer or whether a lot of people do funny things with names of HC objects. How many people have tried to store numbers in or as parts of names (I've tried this, don't be shy). I'm especially interested to hear from people developing stacks where users dynamically create cards and multiple-card links as a result of a user's simpler actions. Peeve #504873: When HyperCard fails from too much recursion, it doesn't lead you into the script of the responsible recursor - it leads you into the script that had the handler guilty of overflowing its HyperTalk handler/function stack, somehow imagining that that handler had to be the recursive handler. It is very painful to be told that a handler that never recurs on itself even indirectly is guilty of too much recursion. This problem is not affiliated with the one where you accidentally use "go" in an openCard handler. - Brian