fixing a common mistake

[Ian Clarke]

I occasionally browse through what people are doing with LastCalc to see what kind of problems people encounter.

By far the most common was people typing something like:

double x = x*2

Hell, I've even made this mistake myself once in a while.  Can you spot it?  "x" is a parameter, so it must be capitalized.  Initially I was going to make LastCalc pop up a warning when it spotted a function definition where it looked like they might have this problem.

But then I thought: why not just fix it?  So now if you try the above, LastCalc will automatically capitalize the "X" parameter.

You may ask: if you can do this, why require the capitalization at all?  Why not assume that if a word appears both before and after the = in a function definition, that it's a parameter?  The reason is that there are several cases where this won't be true, in particular any kind of recursive function.

So my auto-correct system will only do its thing if no variables are capitalized and words appear on both sides of the =, which would tend to indicate that the user has made an error.

Sometime soon I'm going to have to stop procrastinating on the next major feature: user login and worksheet sharing...

Ian.

--
Ian Clarke

Blog: http://blog.locut.us/