Scratch

MohamedSadek: It's about "renaming" that means, you decided a name for an item in Scratch (e.g. a Variable name) and later you want to change that name, because you think an other name fits better or you made an error with the first name. Understand?

I agree!  This should be improved.

@Jens: I'm relay thankful about the better handling of variables in Scratch 1.3 and I also understand your concerns.

Therefore I made an UI-suggestion, how renaming could be better while avoiding the problems you stated above:
There will be right-click a "rename" context menu over every round variable block. If you use it, a Box, nearly the same than the "new-Variable-Box", pops up and asks you for the new name while showing the old name. It's forbidden to choose any already existing variable-Name to avoid problems (If you do, an Error-Message pops up and nothing happens). If you type a non-existing-name, all occurrences of the old name will be replaced by the new name. Because of the Block-Syntax of Scratch this is even more easy than with a Text-Editor, because only Variable-Blocks will be involved and no other part of the Source, that could accidentally be a part-String of a variable name, is changed.
You could even make it possible to switch form local to global and vice versa by that technique, what would be an additional big advantage.

This Technique could also be transfered to all other items (costumes, sounds, objects...) so you never have the very uncomfortable task to go through all your code after change one of it's items name. The little disadvantage doing that is, that you can't type the names of items directly like today, but if you left-click in the name and see the context-renaming-menu, everybody will immediately relearn the new - better - concept.

To  me this UI seams clear, easy to understand and to use with no interpretation-problems. I hope it's also easy to implement. It would motivate all Scratcher to make better readable programs, because often you find the best name for items very late, when the program is already complete. With such an easy renaming-mechanism , as described above, there would be no hesitation to change to the best name.

archmage wrote:

Sometimes I want to change my variable's name but I don't because it would be too much of a hassle.

Also translating the names of all items to other languages would be more easy(e.g. to use programs for educational reasons in class with no English speaking kids).

What do you think?

Last edited by MartinWollenweber (2008-12-08 06:44:02)

Hi Jens,
thank very much you for your fast and (positively) sophisticated answer.

Wow - I didn't think of a general translating mechanism when I suggested the renaming thing! But you are right: That seems to be a solution to even a more generalized form of that problem, if it's well implemented.

Although the problem of typos and wrong choice of resource-indicator strings in the original naming is not solved with your translation mechanism...

But why should the original language (mostly English) have a special state? I think of a resource-indicator string (e.g. a variable-name) as something like a "handle" that you use for a thing that exist even without that handle. As René_Magritte picture says "this is not a pipe", a variable is not its name...

So exchanging of that "handle" (= name in one language) should be easy, even in the original language the program was made in. I regret that I'm not in the Squeak-Implementation of Scratch (not now...:-) but is the exact name of a Scratch-variable really so important (on the condition all names are different)?

I would really like your concept with the export of a .po-File for any Scratch-Program you described. The only missing thing, to have also a renaming-tool with your concept, would be a button: "make .po-File names to the main-names of the program". Than you could translate a program from outside (by changing its .po-file), rename every item with that translation, and make the translation the "original names" so the program hold its new variable names, even without the .po-file.

A more sophisticated solution would be, to store multiple translation within the Scratch program so you could download and upload it with its translations included. Also including the translating tools inside Scratch would be nice to have. But for the start a translation from outside via file and text-editor would be very very helpful, specially if it was enlarged with the renaming-feature explained above.

I hope I find the time and overcoming, to have a closer look into the Squeak Implementation of Scratch myself soon. My Smalltalk-time is somewhat ago as you know, but to jump in again attracts me more and more .... :-)

I relay appreciate your engagement Jens!  Thank you for that!

Last edited by MartinWollenweber (2008-12-08 08:38:28)

I am not really sure...

You can rename a sprite, when you do, every block containing that sprite as an argument is changed too.

These blocks:


perfectly changed into

when I renamed "Sprite1" into "cat".

Why shouldn't it be possible with variables too?