Editing HyperTalk (section)

===Collections===
Containers of a given type were also available as collections with a pluralized version of that container type as its name—the collection of the fields on a card was <code>card fields</code>. These collections were themselves containers with their own properties. Key among these was the <code>number</code> property which was widely used during iterations and similar tasks. For instance, if one wanted to hide all the fields on a card, this could be accomplished with this code:

<syntaxhighlight lang="applescript">
  repeat with i = 1 to the number of card fields
    hide field i
  end repeat
</syntaxhighlight>

This code exposes another common feature of HyperTalk: that a property might have several names and operators. In this case the <code>hide</code> command, and the associated <code>show</code>, act by setting the value of the container's <code>visible</code> property. Thus <code>hide field i</code> is exactly equivalent to {{code|2=applescript|1=set the visible of field i to false}}. A similar example was the <code>lock screen</code> command that stopped visual updating, which was a short form for {{code|2=applescript|1=set the lockscreen to true}}, where <code>lockscreen</code> is a property of HyperCard itself—also a container. Many examples of this sort of [[syntactic sugar]] were found in HyperTalk, in order to simplify the syntax and improve readability of common code.

In HyperCard 2.2 and later, the collection of collections was also available as a container's <code>parts</code>. This allowed a script to address all of the objects in a container with a single iterator.