Quentin Long wrote: >> From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> >> By what means would be indicate which properties we want saved there >> and which ones we don't care about? > > To a first approximation, I'd say that any property which has been > changed from the engine's built-in default value should be saved. One > would expect that the engine's defaults can be easily accessed for > such a purpose?
If completeness were the goal that would of course be a good way to handle it.
But is complete representation of all properties the goal with script-only stacks?
The binary stack file format we've been using for decades does a complete job of retaining all persistent properties as-is, along with anything else a stack file can contain.
Script-only stacks were added to the mix of options to allow us to factor code from UI in ways that work well with the many existing versioning systems.
Expanding on that to transform them into a complete representation of a stack file may not be difficult, but is a different mandate.
And if we err on the side of completeness we may find unwanted side effects for that intended purpose.
For example, what if you slide a script-only stack out of the way to look at something, and then save it. If the format includes the rect the file is marked as changed, yet that change is not something the developer using a script-only stack would care about.
So ideally there would be a way to flag rect as a property we don't want to track in the file.
Or conversely, there could be a mechanism for flagging only those properties we do want, and ignore others.
This seemingly-simple idea turns out to have some sticky implications, which is why, after many years of exploring various serialization formats for stack files, the team opted for script-only stacks as a simple solution for the most common use case.
Breakpoint support may well be a uniquely valuable addition worth considering. I rarely use them myself, but I can appreciate their utility for many.
But if we go down that road we should probably ponder whether that's where the road ends, and if not how we want to travel the rest of that road.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
