Change to the label property in 6.7

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter Haworth wrote:

 > I have to admit that I'm really concerned with the increasing
 > frequency of changes that are being made to the behavior of various
 > entities without regard to backwards compatibility. I don;t disagree
 > that the new way that the label property woks makes more sense, but
 > I am still going through my code to figure out if the change will
 > screw anything up.
 >
 > It causes too many people too many problems to change the way things
 > work.

In all human affairs, change happens when the pain of changing is 
exceeded by the pain of not changing. :)

In this case, after reading the umpteenth time someone complained that 
setting the label left the option control in a disjointed state that 
doesn't reflect for the user the appropriate item, I raised it as a 
question here (or maybe on the forum, can't recall), and after no one 
could think of a reason why they'd want the old behavior I filed an 
enhancement request, where it was further vetted prior to implementation:
<http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11917>

Now we have two ways to set the label of an option control, one that 
triggers the menuhistory message and one that doesn't, just as we've 
always had.  The only change is that it's now much harder to create an 
option control that doesn't make any sense.

It's true that in most years the number of language tokens that are 
modified is zero and this year the number is greater than zero.  But 
only slightly so; it's very rare that old tokens are changed at all.

More importantly, it's never been the case (at least as far as I've ever 
seen in my 17 years with this engine) that such changes are made without 
regard to backward compatibility.  There's a lot of weird syntax 
remaining in the engine for precisely this reason.

With your agreement that the new behavior makes better sense, it seems 
we're still at a complete consensus that this is an enhancement with no 
downside.

If you find one, please file a report on it.

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