question: do we need command aliases

[cies]

since kturtle is revising it's LOGO heritage (syntax change in the
kde4 version and terminology) one of the things i'd also like to
question is the usefulness (and amount) of aliases.

forward, fw
backward, bw
these we might use quite often.. but there are many more (cs, cc, ccl,
sh, tr, tl, dir, pw, pd, pc, rnd)

any strong opinions?

for me, i can live with them, but actually i dont think they make
programming easier to understand so we could as well do without.

the big pro's in my opinion that
- we can remove some lines of code here'n'there,
- scripts get a little more readable, and
- that translation gets a little more straight forward.

it would come at the expense of not beeing able to write a little app
with 40 less keystrokes. (i dont consider breaking compatibility with
old scripts a problem until we reach 1.0)

please let me know what you think?

thanks!
_c.

[Niels Slot]

No strong opinions from me.

The code required to make the aliases work is, in my opinion, pretty small. I don't think it will be a significant amount of work to maintain them.

I would like to know if people really see them as a useful feature as I don't know of any other programming language (except LOGO) that has something comparable.

Niels

2009/7/8 cies <cies....@gmail.com>

[Grigoris Markakis]

I think aliases are very useful because the children don't spend a lot of time to write the commands, especially those who are not familiar with the keyboard. As i have seen in my lesson, kids prefer fw, bw, tl, tr, cc etc. (the Greek translation of them) than the whole-word commands, for that reason.

I' using the whole-word command because i want my code to be more understandable, but i thing that aliases is a good feature and should be remain.

Grigoris 

[cies]

thanks for speaking up..