If you try to right-click rename... the i in a for loop, the 'Variable Name' dialog box doesn't work, you have to left-click and use the 'Script Variable Name' dialog box.
This is very confusing for students (and the third year in a row I have forgotten to warn them about it ahead of time)
Is this the same as this bug?
I have a dream of (semi)retiring and becoming an open-source contributor to Snap! Maybe this would be a good first bug to work on.
I could've sworn that this used to work.
Yeah, renaming is not our strong point. There's also renaming procedures, with its own different mechanism.
it's a shame, because, although it's good for students to think hard about good names for things up front, it's inevitable they will realize too late that a name should be improved, and it would be good if it were easy.
Yeah, I agree, but I'm sure you understand that that's never going to get to the top of our problem list. Which is why you're sort of volunteering.
Yes, sort of.
Do you think would be a good starter issue (for somebody with a programming background)? Or is it more complex than I think it might be?
Ach, don't ask me! Jens is a Smalltalk programmer, so I get a headache trying to read his code. Each method is a one-liner that passes the task along to some other method in some other class, and eventually you get back where you started, and none of them seem to actually do the work.
What I do know is that Bernat invented the rename feature for global and sprite variables but never got it to work for script variables, so that's evidence that it's a hard problem! :~(