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- -- part contents for background part 1
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- From: king@entropy.ms.washington.edu (Jim King)
-
- Date: 1 Mar 88 19:31:02 GMT
-
- In article <43633@sun.uucp>, chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
- > This is from Dan Shafer on CompuServe, and is a list of Erata from the first
- > edition of his HyperTalk programming book.
- >
- **followed by list of errata**
-
- Here are a couple of others from the Shafer book:
-
- (1) a typo in the handler on page 118 (i should be x)
- >
- > p.155 - First sentence should be edited to read: "This command will
- > find the "end" in the words blender and weekend as well as in
- > ending."
- >
- (2) another on page 155, the command find "5" will not find all the
- numbers with the digit 5 but will find only those which *begin* with 5
- (or at least that happened when I tried it) whereas find chars "5"
- will find them all. Amusingly enough, Shafer makes a point of
- explaining this quite clearly on the previous page.
-
- This sense that Shafer hasn't read his own book is heightened by the
- errors on 140 and 145 (using repeat for instead of repeat with) which
- occur right in the middle of an explanation of the differences in
- these two kinds of repeat.
-
- I am impressed in a certain sense by Shafer's ability to whip out a
- book of this size so fast and I have found some useful information in
- it. At the same time, while some errors are inevitable, it seems that
- the scripts in final form could have been extracted (automatically,
- with a button!) and checked to see that they worked before shipping
- the book out to the unsuspecting multitudes. While checking the text
- would have been a more daunting job, it does seem that Shafer relied a
- little too much on what he thought he knew happened instead of trying
- it out.
-
- As for the Goodman book, it seems more reliable to me so far, but I
- did come across a curious passage on page 555. He is explaining that
- the function the Result contains a non-empty string if a Go or Find
- fails. First (no big deal) the message actually returned by FInd in
- the Result is not exactly what he says, but more curiously, the
- example at the bottom of the page, which involves typing "the result"
- (no quotes) in the message box after some failed Go's and Find's
- doesn't show anything although the implication is that there should be
- an error message. On the other hand, when I experimented with this,
- it was possible to put the Result in Message inside a script.
-
- HYPERTALK QUESTION: Why does the Result only seem accessible in a handler and
- not from the message box? Is the Result local in some sense, or is it
- cleared by using the message box?
-
- Back to the books:
-
- My guess is that it will be some time before we see a really
- insightful book about Hypercard that does not come from someone with
- an insider's relationship with the development team (when is Carol
- Kaehler's book on scripting due out?) because the author will first
- have to do enough Hypertalk programming to get some real insights and
- then still will have to write the book. While the insiders' books are
- not quite fair to other potential authors' chances, at least these
- books give "the rest of us" much better documentation than the Mac had
- in the pre-"phonebook edition" Inside Mac days.
-
-
-
- -- part contents for background part 45
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- Re: Shafer: HyperTalk Programming eratta