Would anyone miss convertOctals?

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2022-06-09 20:54, Craig Newman via use-livecode wrote:
> Mark.
> 
> Gong the other way, is your task made much simpler by losing
> “converOctals”? I assume so, or the issue would never have come up.
> Are there other similar language elements that also are on the block?

I'm not sure it makes things 'much simpler' - but it does remove one 
thing to have to think about. Further it removes a case where script is 
ambiguous at parse-time - i.e. the token 0123 could mean one of two 
different things depending on a runtime property.

Given the responses so far, it looks to me like convertOctals is an 
exceptionally rarely used feature (the number of years of LC experience 
amongst those who have responded is in excess of two centuries, and >80% 
of the respondents didn't know what the property was).

Thus any added complexity caused by having this feature seems a waste of 
time/effort/mind-space - particularly as there is a more-than-adequate 
replacement which has none of its problems (i.e. 0o123) - and moreover 
one which other languages (e.g. JS) adopted a long time ago.

In terms of other things which are 'on the block' - then no explicit 
features per-se but there are a couple of extreme 'edge cases' which 
will likely be removed.

For example, the ability to use 'msg' (which is aliased to the content 
of the message box) and '$<envvar>' implicit variables as referenced 
parameters in handlers. Currently you can do:

   on mouseUp
     fillVars msg, $FOOBAR
   end mouseUp

   on fillVars @pA, @pB
     put "foo" into pA
     put "bar" into pB
   end fillVars

The ability to pass these 'quasi-variables' as references will 
potentially reduce the potential performance gains of moving to a 
bytecode-based VM when referenced parameters are used in general, and 
thus (like convertOctals) their existence seems too high a price to pay 
for what is almost certainly a rarely used (if used at all) feature.

Note: I should stress that the above is *just* removing the ability to 
pass 'msg' and environment variable globals as reference parameters to 
handlers *not* removing 'msg' or environment variables in general!

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps