short name broken?

[Richard Gaskin]

dunbarx wrote:


 > Richard wroteL
 >> In v9 try:
 >>
 >> 1. Create a new field
 >. 2. In the Message Box, run:
 >>
 >>    put the short name of last field
 >>
 >> I get the name instead, e.g. "field id 1009".
 >>
 >> IIRC the short name of a field is empty until you set it.  When a
 >> field is unnamed, "the short name" returns empty and "the name"
 >> would return the form shown above, yes?
 >>
 >> Otherwise, we have no way to know when a field has not yet been
 >> named.
 >
 > If I make a new control, and immediately ask for its name, or short
 > name, I have always gotten the default name in the inspector, which
 > is something like:
 >
 > field "field"
 > or
 > button "button".

Exactly.  The form has changed.

This is at least progress, since the older IDE habit of forcing 
redudant-form names was always confusing and needed to go, leading us to 
less-than-graceful coding like:

   put field "field 1" into field 1

This was made super-awkward since ordinal references are a very specific 
thing in xTalks, and the force-applied name used an ordinal form that 
will bear no relationship to its actual ordinal reference the moment its 
layer changes.

So good riddance on that - kudos to the team for finally taking care of 
that.

But here we get to a condundrum:

 > Never empty.

You're absolutely right.  When in doubt I check the 
Winkler-Kamins-DeVoto reference, and indeed they verify that all name 
queries will return a value, even when the property itself is empty. 
When using "the short name" on an unnamed object, WKD says it should 
return the ID form, as LC currently does.

I can appreciate the hand-holding of ensuring that name queries always 
return a meaningful value, it does raise a question:  is it possible to 
know if the name property of an object is empty?

For example, if I wrote a script similar to the older IDE script that 
insisted on setting the name property to a value that resembles what we 
get with unnamed objects, how could we know the object's name us truly 
empty?

In a pre-coffee moment I had mistakenly believe that the short name 
might allow this, but I'm not disappointed to find that LC now follows 
the tradition of the mother tongue.

I suppose if I ever find myself needing to know that I could do this:

function HasNoName pObj
   put the properties of pObj into tA
   return (tA["name"] is empty)
end HasNoName

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com