Comments on 0.96

[OpenXTalkPaul]

There's lots of Americanisms throughout - and that's fine, but I never really understood it. As this was developed in Edinburgh, unless they had American developers, why use American spelling. (Colour instead of Colour), or perhaps this was purely done for compatibility with Hypercard American spelling & continuity between Supercard.

RenRev/LiveCode didn't develop their engine from scratch, it is a direct descendant of the MetaCard Engine and so began its life as a Unix clone of HyperCard by an American developer (Scott Rainey?), and he was cloning the language created by American, Dan Winkler at Apple, so that probably has something to do with it.

Either way, I would have thought that these things should not be fixed in stone. The xtalk language should support localisation, so should change color to colour if your system language is set to English UK.

Hmm, despite my previous comment, I had thought that Edinbourgh by now would have added some UK-English synonyms to the engine so that you could use Color or Colour (the same way you can use 'hilite' or highlight') but I just tried Answer Colour and got nothing. We could probably fix that without much trouble by adding a handler that forwards the call to the American spelling handler. xTalk — much like, or perhaps even more so than many other coding languages, is based on English so I think we should keep to common US/Canadian American/UK English. It's unrealistic for to try to add support for keywords/constants/propertie/etc. in French or Italian something like that. Although I have looked at scripts with comments and variable names in Italian and it was still easy enough to get the gist of it.

[tperry2x]

If we are aiming for this to be the same between OXT RCx and OXT Lite, what did you change please, as in my opinion they probably should match if possible.

[tperry2x]

It's unrealistic for to try to add support for keywords/constants/propertie/etc. in French or Italian something like that. Although I have looked at scripts with comments and variable names in Italian and it was still easy enough to get the gist of it.

Yes, you are right. It would be a huge task. I did think how it could be done by having a language definition file, which is essentially a huge list of all buttons and label fields within each card of each stack in the ide. Then next to each line, the translation of what it should be set to.

Then a script that runs through every control, setting the label of each element appropriately if it exists.
However I can only imagine how much this might break in the ide as it seems to never have been designed with this in mind.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Then a script that runs through every control, setting the label of each element appropriately if it exists.
However I can only imagine how much this might break in the ide as it seems to never have been designed with this in mind.

Well it does have some synonyms and abbreviations (cd/card,bg/backgound,grc/graphic, etc.), but HyperTalk and others (OpenXION) allow stack authors to override the built-in syntax, there weren't 'reserved for future use' comments in the 'Dictionary', no off-limits reserved names you couldn't use for a stack handler's name. Overriding the 'play' command in the interpreter was as simple in HC as writing your own 'on play' in your stacks script. That seems pretty 'open-language' oriented to me.

I really like how Dan Gelder has implemented this sort of thing in his 'HyperCard Simulator', which allows for easy creation of custom user syntax. It's also nice that in its HTML based format it can use chunks of binary data embedded as base64, so that your sounds samples and custom icons come with your stack (a self contained format, I think we can expand on this idea). It's still not clear what the specifics of licensing, but Since Dan clearly allows for it to be shared/copied for personal use, I'm going to be looking into building sort of two-way import<>export to this 'engine' from our IDE and contributing JS code (if he wants it). I'm going to put up a modified version to play around with it.

[richmond62]

I still wonder why Dan Gelder abandoned SERF all those years ago.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I still wonder why Dan Gelder abandoned SERF all those years ago.

Dan did show up in the HyperSim thread (he created HyperSim), so why don't you ask him there?

Probably because it seems like a huge and largely thankless task... a ton of work and then you'll be harshly criticized for even bothering to do that work... Or maybe you could make it into an unaffordable product that only a small community continues to pay for because they're so heavily invested in the idea of it and then they worship you as their hope and savior.

[tperry2x]

[Being a developer]: a huge and largely thankless task... a ton of work and then you'll be harshly criticized for even bothering to do that work...

When I go back to work (doing my day-job) in the new year, I may make that quote my email signature.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

If we are aiming for this to be the same between OXT RCx and OXT Lite, what did you change please, as in my opinion they probably should match if possible.

IN THE IDE REVSHORTCUTS FILE

Code: Select all

 -- in OpenXTalk command-option-S is now "Save As..." since that's far more traditional app behavior
   --  as well as far more useful in my opinion - Paul McClernan 7/15/22
   -- commented out the following script because it was blocking that shortcut key change:
   --
   -- if the optionKey is down and pWhich is "S" and the shiftKey is not down then
   --command-option-S saves all stacks
   --   local tOpenStacks
   --   put revFilterStacksList(the openStacks) into tOpenStacks
   --   repeat for each line tStack in tOpenStacks
   --      if the effective fileName of stack tStack is not empty
   --      then revSave tStack
   --      else revSaveAs tStack
   --   end repeat
   --   exit commandKeyDown
   -- end if
   

To be more in alignment with what popular page layout/graphics programs have used:

if there is a selectedObject with a textSize prop or text chunk selection then command+shift+Plus increases the textSize
if there is a selectedObject with a textSize prop or text chunk selection then command+shift+Minus decreases the textSize.
Likewise, you can change text alignment with command+shift-L (left), command+shift-C (centered), command+shift-R (right)
,
I've also been working on a few palettes for the IDE in between other things for the past 2 years, such as the SVG Glyphs Browser, Color Swatches palettes. One of these mini-projects that I haven't released in any way yet is a styled text editing oriented patette (loosely model on QuarkXPress 3 props palette).