Re: Keywords and Namesapces
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Oct 10, 2011
- 38926 views
Where are you teaching, btw? I'm curious to see what classrooms are using Euphoria.
Your answer was enlightening, but for the wrong question.
Is this really condensing anything? You'd have to remember the name of the function as well as the name of the parameter.
Yes it is, when you can have a tool tip hovering on focus to the new integer parameter as you program - the post-grad student who pointed this out in answer to the similarly raised objections, is the person who suggested the changes in the first place.
This sort of IDE functionality - basically a fancy auto-complete - also exists for classes, namespaces, and even between method/functions with the same prefix (so if you type "some_long_prefix_" then you'll get a tooltip that shows you "some_long_prefix_draw_function", "some_long_prefix_write_function", "some_long_prefix_create_function", etc).
You'd end up with just as many constants (1600 of them at least), unless we're reusing the same constant names for different functions.
We have a separate slate of "system variables" - these are not constants married to a particular namespace but predefined values which are frequently used - more like what you call Global Constants. These are available as click and insert just as all the function names and the user defined variables names are - no chance of misspelt words - period.
Which would work just as well with 1600 function names as it would with fewer function names and 1600 constants.
From my own personal use, I'm not convinced that these sort of IDE features are helpful in any case, but that's irrelevant here. These features can be equally helpful (or hinderful) to someone using the current 1600+ function names of wxEuphoria as they would be to someone using a library following the standards that you advocated.
It is not clear to me that using fewer functions with a special integer parameter - as you described - would make the sort of IDE you are describing any more useful or productive than it already is.
