Soon: requiring parentheses for function applications in educational variant

[Chris Smith]

FYI, for those of you using the educational variant of CodeWorld (code.world, but NOT code.world/haskell), I will be pushing a change soon that requires parentheses for function application.  That means, for example, that "dark green" will need to be rewritten as "dark(green)".

The plan:

1. ASAP: Push a change that adds compiler warnings for missing parentheses, and turns them to errors if and ONLY if the original module fails to compile anyway.

2. O(weeks): Push the change that requires parentheses.

The reason for this change is that accidental function application is still the largest cause of very puzzling compiler errors in CodeWorld.  This happens when a student accidentally leaves out a comma or an operator, and gets an error message complaining about something not being a function.  Pranjal Tale worked over the summer on a project to improve the error message translation in CodeWorld, and we identified this as a significant problem.

Sorry for the breaking changes, but fixes should be easy!

[Chris Smith]

If anyone particularly wants a longer time in the warning stage (for instance, so you can finish a class that's in progress), let me know.  I am just trying to avoid the confusing intermediate state if it's not necessary.

[Peter van den Brand]

I think it's a good idea to change this. There's one kid in my class who left out a comma several times, and the error messages are pretty intimidating and not helpful at all.

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[Dave Sands]

Hi Chris,
Can you please hold off on this change for a couple of weeks? We are using it for an assignment were they are mixing code world style and Haskell style. Sort of a gentle intro to Haskell. This change would screw us up a bit. We might be done earlier, and I could let you know in that case. Cheers Dave