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Date: 27 Nov 87 10:27 EST
From: science@nems.ARPA (Mark Zimmermann)


     A few quick questions (which might be best answered by
examples of how to do things):
  - how can I return more than 255 characters of results to HyperCard
from my XFCNs?  (e.g., can I use a SetField... call, giving it a simple
pointer to a pointer to my long string - or is that dangerous?)
  - if I have generated a zero-terminated string in my XFCN, how can I
return (a handle to) it to HyperCard without going through the pair of
calls ZeroToPas and then PasToZero?
  - how can I store information such as file vrefnums, etc., for use in
later calls to my XFCNs, other than in HyperCard global variables which
then have to be translated to/from strings every time?  (i.e., is there
any way for me to pass binary parameters, perhaps arrays?; is there any
way for me to reserve and hang on to a chunk of memory between calls to
my XFCNs?; etc.)
  - how does an XCMD return an "error" condition, so that the user can
get the result string from returnValue?
  - in HyperTalk, is there any way to ask for information from an arbitrary
point within a file (other than sequentially reading up to that point from
the start) - something like fseek() in <stdio>?
     I am writing some XFCNs in Lightspeed C to retrieve information
from my multi-megabyte inverted index ("Browser") files.  Thanks for any
advice (and especially thanks for any code samples of XFCNs in LSC)!  ^z



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XFCN & HyperTalk questions