LiveCode Forums.

Hi,
I'm a newcomer in this forum ...
I used Hypercard many years ago, level shareware (I sold one!). I acquired enterprise version because I want to resume programming, 15 years later.
I spent the weekend to write lines… I had some trouble with the date functions but it's all right now. Similarly, not easy to use debug, especially to get out, except with command-.... Major problem : opening an old hypercard stack, revolution quit… I've lost scripts because I did not know that revolution needed backup. So I've lost pile1. So I started again by improving (!) my scripts. I then left normally pile2 my version is saved, I go to bed. Tonight, I've launched revolution and it's pile1 ! My fear is to be crazy, but hey, I have a mac. So, i've used Back-in-Time and get pile2.
Who can explain this?
Thank you for your help ...
Éric
Sorry for my poor english, my mother was teaching it, not speaking it !

Eric,

welcome to the forum.

A couple of years ago I also had to find a substitute for Hypercard and came to Revolution. I first had to get used to it but am happy now.
One of the things that took me a while to understand is that Revolution is very picky or strict regarding the naming of a stack. The name of a stack can only be present once. If you start a stack with the same name Revolution asks you what to do, use the newly opened stack or the one that is open. Well most of the time this works but sometime Revolution is confused and keeps on asking.
Another thing is that once you close a stack Revolution still keeps this stack in memory. So it still is there but invisible. And then I dont know somewhere along thes lines the thing you describe might have happened.

My rule is
Always give a stack a unique name (during development I use a name and a number). The name of the stack is the name the inspector shows, not the file name on your harddisk.
Save often, and work on copies of your stacks, especially if you try to convert Hypercard stacks.

After saving a stack as... or anything in the direction of what I described above I often quit Revolution and restart it with the copy of a stack that I want to work on. That may be superstition, but Revolution's behaviour in this regards is still suspicious to me after quite some years.

Although you can convert Hypercard stacks, there are still quirks and irregularities for any stack of sufficient complexity.
I gave up on converting stacks and started to rewrite them in Revolution.
This way you think a little more Revolution and less Hypercard. Revolution has a lot of options that Hypercard does not (think arrays, custom properties and so on).

There are some people here on the forum that have extensive experience with converting Hypercard stacks. So you might find answers in this regard too.

So I could not give you an answer to your original question I hope I explained my view of what might have happened.

regards

Bernd