The point here is surely a practical one.
RR have built executionContexts into the language for their own
purposes, having written the IDE in transcript/revolution (eating
their own haggis, as they put it), and presumably they needed it for
some aspect of writing an IDE.
Assuming that they put it in there with the expectation that they may
need to change the way it works, or even what it does, they chose not
to include it in the general documented description of the language.
We are all free to use it, but RR have no responsibility to ensure
that it will work as we expect in future, unlike the documented
features of the language, which they must be very careful of changing.
We all have bought Revolution, and all versions, AFAIK, 'contain' all
sorts of things to which we do not have access, and wouldn't expect to.
Best,
Mark
On 15 Oct 2006, at 09:40, Richmond Mathewson wrote:
I do not really understand Dar Scott's
"As a product Revolution does NOT have
executionContexts except maybe as a reserved word of
some sort. This is not an underdocumented feature of
the product. I did not buy executioncontexts."
I bought 2 varieties of Runtime Revolution and the
both contain the 'term'
executionContexts
now this may be what Dar Scott terms an "intramural"
part of RR, HOWEVER:
it is part of what I have bought, and as such it would
seem that documenting it might not be a bad thing -
after all if I stumble across it and use it
incorrectly all sorts of unintended results may ensue.
Dar Scott's argument seems to imply that I may not
open my G4 Mac and poke around inside it because some
of the components are "intramural" - sure they are -
they are all 'inside the walls', but I don't see what
that has to do with it - I own the machine;
and, similarly, I own my copies of Dreamcard and
RRMedia.
Needless to say, this discussion leads us,
willy-nilly, towards whether, because I own an
instantiation of a programming environment I am
allowed to muck around with the source-code.
It does seem, however, that if Runtime Revolution (the
company) did not want folks like me to access stuff
like 'executionContexts' they would have built a
'wall' around it so that it was truly intramural.
A secondary point is what Dar Scott means by
"underdocumented" - executionContexts seems not to be
mentioned at all in the documentation.
sincerely, Richmond Mathewson
____________________________________________________________
"Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the
fluidity of meanings users attach to words and phrases."
Mathewson, 2006
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