What is "Open Language"?

[Monte Goulding]

Well there’s two ways to look at this. Either we agree that hilite was a mistake. Implement highlight everywhere then deprecate hilite. Or we agree that highlight was a mistake and we deprecate the small number of uses of that. When I say deprecate I just mean making a note in the dictionary at this stage. 

Either way we are on a slippery slope here. Will we add synonyms for every instance of <something>Rect to give us <something>Rectangle.

Personally I’d be relatively happy for the development engine to quietly fix instances of synonym use in the background when a script is compiled. Doing that you could drop all synonyms without too many issues. I mean is there any logical reason we need to be able to refer to a folder with the folder, the defaultFolder and the directory… Or create a folder using create folder, create directory, new folder or new directory???

I’m sure at some point someone decided that they could import projects from other platforms by creating all these synonyms. A few seconds thought on that and they might have realised that parsing the scripts to change them to use the common syntax would have been much cleaner.

Cheers

Monte

> On 27 Oct 2015, at 1:07 pm, Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:
> 
> Mark-
> 
> Well. *This* certainly seems to have hit a nerve.
> 
> I would be fine with having everything be "hilite". Or with everything being "highlight". Or with everything being "blxxqvy". The point of the original bug report was that there's no consistency in the language. Sometimes you can use the "highlight" form and sometimes you have to use the "hilite" form. The problem is trying to remember which is which.
> 
> So that's what my pull request fixes.
> 
> I agree with what you're saying about the proliferation of synonyms. I'm not wild about most of the other synonyms in the language either... "cd", "fld", etc (although I'd hate to give up "loc" and "rect") But right now we're trying to have it both ways. To my eye the "hilite" form looks cutesy and unprofessional, but I do understand developers are lazy and don't like typing, so I'd be fine with that. It's in the documentation already.
> 
> But really... let's move in the direction of some consistency.
> 
> -- 
> Mark Wieder
> ahsoftware at gmail.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode