Sarah wrote: >> Survey: How many of you use text styles in your code? > Not me! >> >>> Yesterday my "potential corrupt stack paranoia" got the better of me >>> and I >>> spent a while doing a lot of "copy-paste" between the existing stack >>> and a new >>> one. I ended up with the same size, of course...the boogey man never >>> easily >>> shows his hand. :-) >> >> I cannot encourage HC users to take this to heart strongly enough: >> >> When you moved to Revolution, you said goodbye to 99.9999999% of stack >> corruption. > I am really hoping that this proves to be the case :-)
It requires much less than hope, just a little understanding of what corruption is and how it occurs: File corruption means something wasn't written to disk properly. With HyperCard, SuperCard, FileMaker, and a good many other file types, complex structures are written into specific locations within a larger file on the fly, as the program works with only portions of the file at any given time. In most cases write operations are handled outside of your control, and often while your scripts are running. It's this constant writing of file snippets into the file on the fly underunpredictable circumstances that is at the root of corruption, and all complex file formats written in this incremental manner are exposed to this risk (FileMaker even has a menu item to repair corruption, it happens so frequently). MetaCard and Revolution write the entire file in one clean pass from head to tail, and only when you explicitely tell it to. Not only does this give you more control (even allowing you to implement a Revert feature for your data files), but writing all of the file at once makes the operation radically simpler than writing snippets into specific slots within the file. Additionally, Scott Raney wisely implemented an automatic backup: when you issue a Save command, the engine first makes a copy of the file preceded with "~" in the file name, then he does the write, and only when everything's successfully completed it deletes that backup. If it's unable to complete the write for any reason (system error, earthquake, etc.), the newly saved file may be only partially written, but even in this worst-case scenario you have your last successful save waiting for you -- just ditch the bad copy, remove the preceding "~", and you're back in business. I know first-hand how mentally scarring it can be to work for years in systems prone to file corruption, and it took me months to get over the fears instilled in me from previous experience after I started using MetaCard. But with nearly daily use (and sometimes all day <g>) for more than 5 years, my personal experience is on par with what Scott reports: I've had one graphic object record get corrupt on me many years and several versions ago, and even then I simply deleted the object and all was well; I've experienced no corruption of any kind for more than for years since. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution