Notice about renaming in CodeWorld

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Chris Smith

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May 27, 2016, 4:38:07 PM5/27/16
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Hello everyone!

Since it's the end of the school year, I'm going ahead with some renaming I've had on my plate for a while.  Specifically:

1. The pictureOf function is now called drawingOf.
2. The line function is now called path, and the thickLine function is now called thickPath.
3. In http://code.world/haskell, Picture is now a Monoid instance.  The CodeWorld module now re-exports <> from Data.Monoid, and this is the preferred way to combine pictures versus the old & operator.


The reasoning for the changes is as follows:

1. It was confusing for many students that pictureOf produced a Program, rather than a Picture.  The new naming, while still obeying my grammar rules that functions should not be verbs, is more logically coherent, and empirically less confusing for students when I tried it.

2. It's long been a wart inherited from Gloss that "line" draws a sequence of line segments.  This finally eliminates the wart.

3. This is another step toward making the code.world/haskell environment follow Haskell conventions more closely.

The old names still work, but have been deprecated.  I've updated the online help, the student guide, and the topic outline, but some of the supporting material (handouts, presentation slides, and lesson plans) still use the old names for now.  I will be updating them as time allows.

Thanks,
Chris
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