Chapter 19. The Lingo Symbol Table
Director maintains a hidden table containing every keyword or “symbol” in use. In this context, symbol denotes any word Director recognizes, including “true” Lingo symbols that begin with a pound sign (#). (Refer to Chapter 18.) In point of fact, all recognized keywords are converted to symbols for storage in the Symbol Table. Thus, the keyword mouseUp
is stored internally as #mouseUp
. See "Symbols" in Chapter 5, for the party line regarding true Lingo symbols, which I will refer to as “Lingo symbols” in this chapter to indicate those items traditionally thought of as symbols.
The Symbol Table includes built-in symbols and keywords defined by Director itself, and symbols, variable names, handlers, and so on, defined by the programmer.
Tip
See the downloadable Chapter 22, Symbol Table Archaeology, at http://www.zeusprod.com/nutshell/chapters/symtable.html for many more details.
Why Do I Care?
You can use the Symbol Table for some neat stuff (which is what being a geek is all about).
Verify whether Director recognizes a particular keyword. This is useful when there is a typographical error in the documentation. For example, the FileIO Xtra’s documentation claims that it supports a method called
getOSdir
, which is actually namedgetOSdirectory
. You can verify thatgetOSdir
is not recognized by Director and therefore not a valid keyword.Avoid overflowing the Symbol Table (applies only to Windows 3.1). If your movie suddenly starts behaving very oddly under ...
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