Editing HyperTalk (section)

===Lists and other collections===
HyperTalk used the same chunking system to produce structures like arrays or lists. Such a structure would be created by placing multiple data items in a variable, separated by commas. Various types of data could be imported into a HyperTalk script using strings that would get parsed as required. For instance, the position of objects on the screen was defined by a pair of numbers representing the X and Y coordinates relative to the upper left corner. The following code creates a variable called ''pos'' that holds a coordinate pair, and then manipulates this to re-position all of the buttons on a card in a diagonal from top-left to bottom-right:<!-- is this really what the code does? I don't see what causes the "diagonal" aspect -->
<syntaxhighlight lang="applescript">
  on mouseUp
    put "100,100" into pos
    repeat with x = 1 to the number of card buttons
      set the location of card button x to pos
      add 15 to item 1 of pos
    end repeat
  end mouseUp
</syntaxhighlight>
The <code>item</code> chunking expression was originally based on a comma [[delimiter]], but later versions of HyperCard changed this to the value of <code>itemDelimiter</code>, offering the ability to parse arbitrary lists and structures.