How to visually discriminate between sprite properties and user variables

[callietastrophic]

By the way, you're not allowed to say "everyone uses x86, so it must be better." The answer to that is "everyone also runs Windows."

I mean I never said that. Honestly, I think a Playstation three that properly utilised it's bonkers design would still be a stupidly powerful device, but IBM never went further than researching any proper successor to the cell architecture. I also think Phones are criminally under used and are more powerful than are given credit for and am disappointed that PhoneVR basically just vanished into Facebooks MetaQuest.

Anyway, This has gone a little offtopic, so I'll let it die. (Cause it's my fault lol)

[s_federici]

@bh

a kid, who's just been taught that a+b+c means (a+b)+c, and maybe even has recently been taught the associative law
∀a,b,c: (a+b)+c = a+(b+c)
it's easy to generalize that notation incorrectly to (a<b)<c, which is meaningless.

Going back to (part) of the original topic, this reminds me of the different way "chaining assignement" was handled by my very first BASIC (TI/99 Basic) where

a = b = 0

wasn't a shorthand for "a = 0; b = 0" but it actually meant

a = (b = 0)

So, as "=" in BASIC was both the assignment and the equal operator, if b was 0, the value of a was -1 (that is, "true"). Otherwise the value of a was 0 (that is, "false").

But this is not the point. As soon as I saw the first time "a = b = 0", for me it was "a = 0; a = b" so I didn't get at start that it was instead "a = (b = 0)". Even if I knew, since elementary school, that "a + b + c" was "a + (b + c)".

So, to sum up, to me "a < b < c" is the same as "a < b AND b < c". I would never thing that it could mean "a < (b < c)" or "(a < b) < c". To me the "a < b < c" notation is clear, and it is a good shortand. Furthermore, I like a lot the idea of a "between" operator.

@bh

Our goal as a language for learners isn't to minimize keystrokes, especially since in a block language you don't have to use any keystrokes at all, so we can have primitive names such as ALL BUT FIRST OF. So there's no need for us to use terse but unfamiliar strings of punctuation characters.

Agree. Our (my?) goal is that a good educational programming language, to be useful, should require the minimum amount of explanantion. That is why the Italian version of Snap blocks (and, of course, Scratch's) is longer than the English ones.

@bh

"Syntactic sugar leads to cancer of the semicolon." --Alan Perlis.

I love it!

@bh

I don't think we should inflict binary arithmetic on children, but then again I don't think we should inflict decimal arithmetic on children either. We do so (binary I mean) mainly because it's the only thing about computers that teachers really understand.

True. Binary arithmetic can be explained in a CS course only once students get interested in how computers work internally. But they should never have binary calculations in their tests. Of course, they can have this topic in their mathematics/algebra courses.

@d4s_over_dt4

I think that we should learn binary,ternary and hexadecimal :~P

Why only this? When I was 6 my teacher taught us how to do calculations in every base (3, 4, 5, etc). But this was just "maths" gymnastics to widen our thinking

[d4s_over_dt4]

@s_federici

how to do calculations in every base

Yeah,I technically can do that too,but often get dumb errors between bases(on the carry threshold)

[s_federici]

@d4s_over_dt4

Yeah,I technically can do that too,but often get dumb errors between bases(on the carry threshold)

[cymplecy]

I just used to do base 8 ( what octopuses use I told them) with my classes as an introduction to base 2.

Only used to do this with 11 year olds post final exams