Scratch

The purpose of this forum is to communicate with Rick3137 about our long-stagnant programming language.  That being said, feel free to input any ideas.

Anyway:

Looking at this, I am coming to realize that both of our scripts are, well, erm... unreadable.  This is probably due to two primary facts:

We both comment sparsely.  The only key we have to eachother's variables are the variable's names, and the code that we wrote has to be interpreted line-by-line.

It has been months since I worked on this and the purpose of lots of my scripts (and through transition, lots of your scripts) remain a mystery to me.  This is again, due to the lack of comments that I left and is one of the reasons comments are essential.


What do you think of starting over again, this time with a clear picture of what we want to accomplish.

It seems that you are trying to mimic (sort of) basic.  Just so you know what I envision:



If command:   if(this = that) { do this }
This may be broken into this:

if(this=that) {
do this code
}

[b]or this:[b]

if(this=that)
{
do this code
}


I don't consider loops important if we use the "GoBack" command.  A loop is easily imitated with the if-statement (e.g. if(condition){GoBack BeginningOfLoop}).  Overall, this is the most major deviation from common scripting that I am looking at.  Aside from being easier, the GoBack command also seems more flexible.  Functions may even be possible! And you wouldn't have to declare them.  Just place the GoBack command just before them and move the running script ahead of the function to skip it.  To access the function, simply GoBack to the beginning of the function, just after the skip-command.


I am moving away from the declaration of variables because I think if we want complex statements (e.g. 5+(x*6)  ) single-letter variables will be much easier to work with.  If we are only going to use single-letter variable names, pre-declared variables seem much easier to work with.


As I mentioned in my comment: very flexible "datatypes".  Scratch already does this for us.  I simply propose adding lists/arrays to the mix.  All variables will be lists, though many may simply have a length of 1.


As far as GUI, I want to mimic the HTML5/JavaScript canvas element.  Commands:

StrokeRect(x,y,xchange,ychange) draws a rectangle with the upper left hand corner at (x,y) and moves right by xchange and down by ychange.  Since filling in rectangles seems unrealistic (at least, until the new Scratch comes out, it may have the stretch-blocks that will make it easy), this can be abbreviated
to Rect(x,y,xchange,ychange)

Line(startx,starty,endx,endy) seems pretty self-explanatory

Colors will be difficult as Scratch doesn't have these built in.  I was thinking just setting the default color to red and using the "change pen color" block to reach the large range of colors.  Having a prebuilt gray-color and changing pen shade will give us gray scale.

changecolorby(x)
changeshadeby(x)
color = gray
color = red

For sounds, your previous method seems as good as any.  The addition of the "rest __ beats" would be nice, as well as a tempo-setting command.  A nice side effect of the rest__beats is that we may not have to have a wait command.

Show me your ideas and what you would like to see as the final product.  We'll see where we can compromise and where one of us can concede.

Last edited by MoreGamesNow (2011-08-25 11:37:31)