Script Limit

[David Bovill]

This is exactly the sort of service / product that will be destroyed by
the proposed change. My situation is similar for open source programming
books - students / readers need to be able to do limited coding.

The fact that this does not effect anyone with a licenced home stack is
clear, but irrelevent. The damage is done to people addressing end users
with the above type projects, and (which is similar) to people trying
out the language for their first project.


On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 17:42, Dr. John R. Vokey wrote:

> Good advice *if one is producing ``products'', i.e., applications that 
> just so happen to be written in metacard , but could have been done in 
> c or BASIC)*  I, however, produce extensible ``stacks''---following the 
> original hypercard model--- that I freely exchange with my students and 
> colleagues.  Often, these stacks are boot-strapped in that they provide 
> for a simple scripting language---a mixture of metatalk and procedures 
> and functions I have added---to accomplish some goal, such as a stack 
> that provides a resampling statistics language so that students and 
> colleagues can program their own resampling solutions, or a language to 
> program experiments that is itself extensible.  Thus, the user writes 
> lines of code (the afore-mentioned mixture of metatalk and new 
> commands) that are then executed (usually via `do', but sometimes by 
> replacing the script of some object): the user is not knowingly 
> programming metacard, but using the new language.  The proposed limits 
> mean that the metacard (ok, RR) ``player'' is broken.  To make use of 
> my ``stacks'', the user must now have a licensed version of metacard 
> (RR).  It is (was?) this boot-strapping extensibility of xtalks (as 
> with their threaded-interpretive-language, TILs, predecessors) that has 
> been the core secret of their success, and the proposed loss of it in 
> metacard/RR---the alleged successor to hypercard, is anathema.  RR just 
> becomes yet another cluttered IDE with an odd programming language.  At 
> a minimum, ``do'' should remain unlimited, but I would prefer to remove 
> the limit on replacing scripts, as well.  After all, haven't licensed 
> users agreed not to produce a new RR in RR/metacard?  And now that the 
> free (but 10-line script limited) metacard is to be gone, to be 
> replaced by a 30-day, web-checked (ugh!) demo, why are the limits 
> needed at all?  The whole direction is ominous.