richmond62 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 21, 2021 5:52 pm
SuperCard . . . I think it was called the Shrink Tool.
Well . . . I wonder how close SuperTalk is to LiveCode . . . ?
The two languages are very similar, but just different enough that after doing several ports from SC to LC I came to the opinion that the better strategy is redesign with reimplementation by hand.
The Shrink tool, however, draws our attention to the biggest difference - not between the languages, but between the IDEs.
SC had something I've not seen elsewhere, SuperEdit, a separate environment focused on layout where you can operate without any scripts running.
Written entirely in C, SuperEdit had a few goodies that weren't part of the language.
If memory serves (it's been quite while since I ran SC), the Shrink tool was present only in SuperEdit.
If that's true, there's a good chance its code came from SuperPaint, another popular app from the same original publisher, Silicon Beach Software.
Even if SC's Shrink tool was only in SuperEdit, it should still be possible to script a similar thing in LC. I vaguely recall someone having done something quite similar here in these forums some years ago.
But it wouldn't be as easy as just looking at a SuperCard script for inspiration. It would need to be written from scratch.
And the original being in compiled object code and an LC version being in script, we should expect the usual performance differences between native and interpreted code.