bogs wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2019 8:16 pm
FourthWorld wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2019 4:12 pm
I have no idea what hellishly unpredictable morass goes on in other development environments to make file corruption such a frequent suspect for scripting issues in LC, but while we pray for the users of such systems I can offer calming assurance that if you can open an LC stack file it's probably not corrupted.
Heh, I hope you don't take this the wrong way Richard, and I also hope you don't think what I'm about to type is too harsh,
but, that comment seems beneath you, really, like a cheap shot.
It's been a while that I wrote something you felt could stand without correction, so it's not surprising this is another case where you and I are coming at an issue with different perspectives.
In my 30-year career as a published technical writer I don't always get it right. But I find that taking a light-hearted tone helps far more often than it's misunderstood. But humor's funny that way, and everyone's different. The OP I was writing for will be able to tell us, but I don't mind clarifying my intention:
As you know from the years we've spent here, and the conversations we've had like this one before, when I write something that may appear to you as somehow insulting that's never been the goal, and indeed this is like all the other times we go 'round on this.
I can either assume the OP is writing random nonsense, or is writing something reasonable based on direct personal experience. I don't believe it's a mistake to assume the latter.
So if corruption is expressed as a likely cause, where would such an expectation come from?
Those of us who use LC regularly understand that unexpected behavior can be caused by many things. Sometimes it's user error. Sometimes it's a bug in the software. But it's very rarely file corruption.
So when corruption is assumed, and if we assume the OP is a reasonable person, where does the suspicion of such a highly specific cause come from? Since we know that's a rare issue in LC, it's a relatively safe bet the familiarity with corruption comes from experience with something else where that's an actual things that happens often.
A lot of LC users have experience with corruption in HyperCard and Filemaker. Indeed, in Filemaker corruption was so common in earlier versions that they had a "Repair Database" command built into the File menu. With HC, I can't recall the number of AOL and Usenet threads about the infamous "Error 5454", but it was common enough that many of us even remember the specific error code number.
All that said, it's possible that my assumptions may be incorrect. It may be that corruption is just a random guess, or that the OP has actually experienced frequent corruption with LC stack files.
If the latter, that would be useful to know, esp. so we can find the recipe and fix it. But I'm disinclined to write off the OP as somehow typing randomly or misrepresenting what they've experienced, so indeed my response, while worded light-heartedly, supportively assumes they're telling the truth about what they've learned from systems where corruption is frequent.
Having used a few languages over the years, I never thought about file corruption in any of them.
Aside from HyperCard and Filemaker, and very few others, my experience is like yours: don't see corruption often in LC.
Maybe the OP is coming from Filemaker? I dunno. We'll learn more when the OP replies.
The first time I ever thought of file corruption was when I was still new to Lc and tried to open a file saved in a later version of the IDE than I was using, which presented me with this cheery message -
fileCorruption.png
And the reason I thought (at the time) that it was corrupted was because I *knew* I had created the file in Lc and saved it as a stack.
Exactly. With corruption the stack can't be opened. For the first several years the engine's generic message was displayed, and for the last decade or so the IDE now presents a more specific notification about formats and possible corruption.
I think that the reason people jump to 'file corruption' is because they get a result they don't expect, like I did. I've gotten lots of results I didn't expect when learning this languge (far too many to list) for things I regularly did in other IDEs. Maybe it is the same here eh?
Might be. We'll know more when the OP returns.
Errors can occur for all sorts of reasons, sometimes a bug and sometimes user error. No worries, that's what we're here for, to help sort them out.
But the assumption that a problem is specifically related to corruption is interesting, esp. given how the assumption appears in this forum so much more frequently than any actual corruption.
As we explore ways to enhance onboarding materials, learning more about where this specific preoccupation with corruption comes from will help us better refine the learning experience.
