Passing a function as a parameter to another function

[tjm167us]

Hi everyone,
I am interested in passing a function as a condition to a repeat loop within a function I am writing that I want evaluated every time through the loop. In code:

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function myRepeat conditions, maxIterations
   put 1 into loopCounter
   repeat until (conditions or loopCounter>maxIterations)
      wait 200 milliseconds
      add 1 to loopCounter
   end repeat
   return 0
end myRepeat

With the idea that conditions could be something like "the mouseClick". I would then use this function like:

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put myRepeat("the mouseClick",3) into output

What I am really asking is how I can make LiveCode interpret a text string as a function call. Not sure I have ever done this before or if this is even possible!
Thanks,
Tom

[FourthWorld]

Quoted text will be passed as a literal string. Unquoted text will be evaluated before being passed to the function.

[tjm167us]

Hi Richard, thanks for the prompt response. However, I don't think that's quite what I'm looking for. I understand not using the quotes (because I don't want the parameter in the repeat loop to be a string, I want it to be a function). But I also don't want the "mouseClick" function to be evaluated before the function call "myRepeat" is evaluated. I want the function to be evaluated every time through the loop to determine whether I should stop looping. Does this make sense? I can provide more info if necessary!
Thanks,
Tom

[FourthWorld]

Ah, thanks for the clarification. There are probably many ways to solve this, and if I knew more about the context and larger goals of the application I might be able to suggest something better than this, but you can use the value function to have a string evaluated, e.g::

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function myRepeat condition, maxIterations
   put 1 into loopCounter
   repeat until ( value(condition) is true or loopCounter>maxIterations)
      wait 200 milliseconds
      add 1 to loopCounter
   end repeat
   return 0
end myRepeat

My reluctance in relying on the value function is the same generic caution I have with the "do" command: while useful in some contexts, there's usually a more efficient and less error-prone way to handle things (open-ended runtime evaluation can be very tricky to debug if anything goes wrong). But both of those exist in the language for a reason, much as JavaScript has its eval function, and when you need 'em you need 'em.