"over there"

[tperry2x]

Today, the folks at LC decided to send me more spam.
Amongst their iOS announcement, they also mention the fillback and penback bug fixes.

Screenshot_20231116-174229_Firefox Focus.jpg (53.62 KiB) Viewed 1358 times

Wasn't it only a few weeks ago we mentioned that "over here"?

[richmond62]

I mentioned that over here because it was in their guff for a release candidate over there: something to brag about: a bug that has been sorted out after about 12 years.

[tperry2x]

I thought about how we could easily fix that 'over here'.

If fillback is the same as backgroundcolor, and penback is the foregroundcolor, then we should just be able to set (for want of a better word, aliases). So when you run something mentioning fillback, it just returns the backgroundcolor without crashing.

Paul, I'll have to defer to you here - how would this be set up?
I'd like to set up a few additional fixes in this manner.

[richmond62]

Paul's gone back into another lurking phase.

[tperry2x]

I wish I knew how to mention users in these forum posts, because then I could mention his username and he'd presumably get an email. I suppose I'll just private message him, with the link to this post.

[FourthWorld]

Easier to flag rarely-used synonyms as deprecated.

Most current users will never miss them, and no new user will miss them at all.

As we see here, synonyms create technical debt for the life of the code base.

[richmond62]

By flagging sonething as 'deprecated' (not a word in my lexicon), does that mean that it will become as non-functional in xTalk as, say, 'Heffalump'?

[tperry2x]

The fact that penback and fillback exist (and more to the point) can cause a spontaneous crash, should be more than enough reason to either remove them altogether so that OXT just returns (nothing) - or, as I suggest, just make the command return the foregroundColor and backgroundColor as appropriate.

But I would like to know how to make synonyms in the syntax, so one thing refers to another.
The reason for this is to deal with other bugs already documented.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Paul's gone back into another lurking phase.

I'm not lurking, I'm still concentrating on working on things when I can, and/or just busy with other things like family, health, making a living, etc.

I have managed to build an on-screen keyboard widget, adding a little bit each night (without the extension compiler being available while working on it). I really should document the process I used to build it. A lot of the work was done in the vector drawing side, grouping, making compound paths with no primitive shapes such as rect (they're all d="..." SVG Path strings, even the rects). It now properly handles 'do optionKey && tKey in widget' for extended characters like © ® £ .

Yeah, I've never heard of that Syntax 'fillBack' until this topic, so I'm not real concerned about supporting it (sorry, SuperCarders or whatever xTalk used that keyword). There are already synonym for backgroundColor that don't crash the engine, so would look for 'backColor' and treat 'fillBack' the same as that.

I did do some tests with creating the property for a test grc object and trying to catch it with setProp, getProp but it always crashes the engine any time that is called so I'm guessing it's something that would need fixing on the engine/interpreter level. You could try to edit the property text files for default properties and object property files, which are tab delimited values files (so its easy to look at in a spread sheet app) and see if adding it in there could somehow help. IIRC community member did a write up of how to add properties for controls in the property inspector on github, I think I forked it into my repos.

I've not spent a lot of time trying to work around this exact issue, but I did spend a little time trying to override the scriptTextSize property which is one of those non-functional 'for compatibility with' syntax. The best I could come up with strictly using IDE scripting was to make a command with the same name (Easter egg, in my builds of OXT you should be able to do 'scriptTextSize 14' from the Message Box to change the font point size of the scripts in the Script Editor and Message Box). I doubt that trying to do the message trapping higher in the message path hierarchy would help. I did some tests trying to catch 'Play' command in the past (something you can do with some other xTalks, HyperCard, OpenXION). It seems like its not possible to override engine messages, keywords or otherwise reserved words on the script level, it mostly seems that the engines source is where such a thing must be done. Classic Control Properties might be a bit different since those pull properties from the mentioned files..

Extension builder module couldn't help here, unless the classic graphic control was replaced a new graphic widget, you could easily add fillBack as a synonym in a widget version. My 'Vector Drawing Board' widget would be practical place to start if one were to attempt to rebuild the graphic object as a widget.