Scratch

Currently, the only way to "hide" a variable temporarily is to put a sprite in front of it.  If the sprite looks the same as the background behind the variable display, then the variable is effectively hidden.

Variable windows should IMO be treated exactly like sprites.

You create a variable, and a new sprite appears in the sprites list.  That sprite will display the variable, comes with 3 costumes (ordinary, large and slider) and can be manipulated exactly the same way as any other sprite, including moving, hiding, and colour effects.

Even cooler would be the ability to take the "large" costume and edit it, adding frames or whatnots of your own around the outside (the central display bit would not be editable).

Well, you could - in principle - design your own "variable sprite" in Scratch, couldn't you? it would just involve lots of costumes (for every number in your scope), which in turn would be chosen according to the value of the actual (hidden) variable you would want to monitor. Alternatively you could just make one 10-digit sprite, clone it a couple of times and use a decimal algorithm to display large numers / fractions.

There's a pretty cool project by MSP1 demonstrating some of this:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/MSP1/3505

When you look a the code of that project you'll notice that the scripts can be simplified significantly by using Scratch's 'secret' ability to address a costume by its position-number rather than by its name.

If you're after sliders/scrollbars, there are also lots of projects that you could remix to build your own generic slider, with which to control the value of your variables.

Since Scratch now has the fantastic capability to export / import 'generic' sprites you wouldn't even have to assemble these variable monitors every time 'from scratch'.

I have done multi-digit display as stamps:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/kevin_karplus/2951
but not as multiple sprites---that struck me as too painful to manipulate and re-use.

I like the idea of being able to manipulate a variable display exactly like a sprite (with movement, show/hide, color effects, multiple costumes, ...)  Of course, I'd *really* like the displays to work correctly with large and small numbers---whoever designed them forgot about the space taken up by exponents in scientific notation, and they get really messed up.

Please help can't hide a veriable!<when[  ]key pressed>

;D

well I use the cover up variables alot, It even used 2ce in my nightly turret shooting game http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Maker/213552 the game isn't that good but I was testing out what you were talking about.

I just grab the screen region and create a sprite that blends in with the background.  By showing the sprite it covers up the variable but causes no additional effect.  Still, I agree that a simple hide block for each variable would be very helpful.