At 12:20 PM -0400 10/2/01, Troy Rollins wrote: >Geoff Canyon wrote: > >> I regard xCards (and scripting languages in general) as the best form of code >> reuse yet found. . . . All this combines to enable >> a depth and breadth of reuse available nowhere else. > >Hmm, nowhere else? While in no way taking away from Rev (and its admitted >power), it could be argued that iShell's "code" is EXTREMELY portable. Rev's >scripts are nicely flexible for these purposes (especially when written for >portability from the "get go"), but nothing beats drag selecting part of an >iShell "root" outline, and dragging and dropping it into a new (or existing) >one. Done.
Isn't what you are describing exactly the same thing I'm describing -- the re-use that a scripting system (iShell, in this case) offers? Or is there something else to iShell I'm missing? Just to be clear, I would include in this class of tool the following, some more so, some less: Revolution, MetaCard, SuperCard, HyperSense, HyperCard. ToolBook and all the similar PC products. Director, iShell, and a variety of multimedia-focused tools. Visual Basic, REALbasic, and their kind. PowerBuilder, Oracle Forms, etc. Perl, Python, TCL, etc. Javascript AppleScript, Frontier, Visual Basic for Applications Excel Spreadsheets FileMaker Pro, 4D, Panorama, Helix, Access Java Etc., Etc., Etc. There are a myriad of products that offer the kind of reuse I'm talking about to greater or lesser extents. The key (to me) is the clear division between "code to be reused" and "code that uses the reusable code." Code reuse is never easier than when the reusable code is a self-contained black box, with perfectly clear interfaces because otherwise you wouldn't be able to use it. This division is crystal clear in many products, the xCards among them. It is less so in some other products such as Java, where the interface widgets are mostly encapsulated, but the code provided is not. So where _does_ iShell fall in that spectrum? regards, Geoff
