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Wednesday, February 6, 2002

There's an interesting discussion on the RB list about functions and procedures and whether or not it's ok to ignore function results. Currently RB doesn't allow you to do that. Some are requesting that be more like C. Others have suggested that a new Call syntax be implemented that would force a programmer to at least be aware that results are being ignored. I remember when I went from Pascal, that doesn't ignore function results, to C, that does, and being so happy. I think the distinction between function and procedure is silly. And in modern C you can write the equivalent of a procedure by declaring that a function return void. comment ()  9:53:15 AM  #   Bell Nuit Montage released an update to RtfParser. comment ()  9:46:13 AM  #   Matthias Bürcher has some thoughts on how to port a macintosh application to windows. comment ()  9:39:50 AM  #   [ANN] Belle Nuit Textfilter <http://www.belle-nuit.com/textfilter/win32.html>; <ftp://ftp.belle-nuit.com/matti/pub/textfilter100win32beta.zip>; (868 KB) comment ()  9:37:07 AM  #   In writing Radio Composer I stumbled over another REALbasic funniness. I really like RB, but there are some strange things you always end up having to work around. In this case, I have a window with several controls in it. I want to implement 'paste', but I want the behavior to be different depending on the focus. The way I'd like it to work is that every control has a EnableMenuItems event and, also, that every control can have menu handlers. That way I can define a menu handler for paste for each control. And there would be a cascade, of course. So the window could also have menu handlers and if the focused control didn't handle a menu then the window could provide default behavior. Well, that' just not the way things work. So instead you have to play games by having a window property to hold the currently focused item and, I would guess, a bunch of ifs in the window's paste menu handler to handle things for whatever control is focused. Kinda quirky if you ask me. comment ()  8:43:33 AM  #   Eventually I'd like Radio Composer to become Radio Poster. It would actually post for you. I need to figure out how to talk to radio remotely first. I'm hoping UserLand just has that documented. But maybe they don't. comment ()  8:37:59 AM  #   Now that I'm no longer playing with Captian Stuffit (a friend says I should have named it Captain Crunch) I have turned my full attention to Radio Composer. I've actually whipped up a demo that almost works. A compose window has two panes: a compose pane and a link substitution list. You drag or paste a URL into the links list and name it. Then you can refer to it by name in the compose window by surrounding the name with '#' characters like this: #name#. Once you have composed you can copy from the compose window and the text in the clipboard is automatically formatted so that links are turned into tags. The name of a link becomes the text between the tags (the text that people see in their browsers. I'm thinking I'll also support style characters so that *bold* will become bold and _italics_ will become italics. In the fullness of time, I'd like to support real styles, but that sounds like work. comment ()  8:36:18 AM  #

© Copyright 2002 Will Leshner. Last update: 2/6/02; 9:53:16 AM.