On 2018-04-03 11:35, David Bovill via use-livecode wrote:
True - I’d rather be first-class than complete anyway.
To use a more concrete analogy - all British citizens are (since
suffrage!) 'first-class' in the sense they can vote, but are not
'complete' in the sense that there exist things which some citizens are
allowed to do, which others are not.
And yes thanks for suggested way around incompleteness. I still
suffered
culture shock. The use-case I had was to replace send syntax with the
more
elegant set the ... of object to syntax. I found myself wanting a bit
more
power ...
That's a slightly different thing - I'd suggest that even your proposed
'more elegant' solution is actually probably much less readable than
using 'send' in the long run as, if I read that line it isn't entirely
clear what it is intending to do...
So, I'm guessing what you really want to be able to do is:
set the textColor of chunk tChunk of tMyObject to light-grey for each
tChunk in spellingArray
Or (with slightly less use of non-existant syntax):
set the textColor of each element of spellingArray to light-grey
Where 'spellingArray' is a numeric list of chunk references. Which would
be the same as:
repeat for each element tMisspeltWordsChunk in spellingArray
set the textColor of tMisspeltWordChunk to "light gray"
end repeat
Which does actually work now - as you can have things like "char 1 to 20
of field 1" in a variable, which will be parsed at runtime when its the
target of a set command.
Power is not always a good thing. I’m glad that the dignity of arrays
has
been restored.
Power and syntax are intimately related - in the sense that how we
encode what we want to do as syntax will give us power in some ways,
whilst removing it in others (the only way for that to not be the case
is to make the syntax more verbose and more difficult to write - think
machine code vs. LiveCode Script).
The above is actually a very good example of this as you *can* actually
use an array as an index outside of setProps, it just means something
perhaps much more useful...
i.e.
put "foo" into tPath[1]
put "bar" into tPath[2]
put tArray[tPath] into tBarOfFooOfArray
Numerically keyed arrays starting from 1 can be used as an array index,
in which case they are considered to be a sequence of keys to follow.
The above is the same as:
put tArray["foo"]["bar"] into tBarOfFooOfArray
To put it another way, as it stands, the use of arrays as indexes in
arrays has been chosen to mean something which is (to be fair) a *great
deal* more useful than array-valued keys - as it makes array paths (i.e.
sequence of keys) first-class in the language.
(Also, all uses of array-valued keys anywhere can be transformed to code
which derives a canonical name from an array before being used as a key
- which is probably something you should be doing anyway directly were
you to ever think you have a need for such, otherwise it masks what the
code is *actually* doing, as well as probably causing you horrendous
performance problems for cases you have not foreseen and will occur!).
Of course, what you wanted (I presume) is a more succinct way to set a
property of a collection of chunks to a single value - i.e. one which
takes one line, rather than 3 - which isn't really anything to do with
array-valued array keys at all - and more syntactic sugar for what other
languages would call 'list comprehension' I guess.
Warmest Regards,
Mark.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps
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