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JSE - Todo List Blog
10th June 2021
A mild stumbling block, yesterday. I do hope it's now working properly, again, for everyone.

-=-=-

Michael Fernie requested a quick "KillParticles" function last night, so I popped that in fairly swiftly.

This morning, over on SoCoder, therevillsgames made a subtle hint that I have oldskool numerical habits.
This has been pointed out several times over the past few weeks. The last person to point it out was DamienG, the font maker, who suggested I add names for the fonts instead of just using numbers.
D'oh!!

I started coding back in the Amstrad CPC days, using nothing but BASIC. Chr$ were numbers, Joystick controls were numbers, Inks were numbers.
Numbers were everywhere, and rather than going "Boy, I wish those were labels", my head went down the "Well, better learn these numbers" route.
I STILL code like that.
And it's one of those "Bad Habits" that I keep referring to whenever I say that people probably shouldn't be learning from my examples. I'm bloody awful at coding "properly", and it definitely shows.

But this is one of those habits I really need to keep in check, and it's good that people are pointing out things in languages that .. I simply just don't use!!
This morning, when I spotted therevillsgames' request for Consts, I thought to myself "Well, why not just assign a variable and then leave it..?"
But that's not what consts do. They instead flick through the script and replace references with the actual hardcoded numbers. It means the whole thing runs a teensy bit quicker than if it had to keep hunting for variables every time they crop up.
So.
Yeah, I really should do that properly.

I'll add that to the todo list, and maybe make it a top priority.

Let's have a look at what's left on that list.

. The Minus Issue. Print -5
This one's still winding me up. Surely it can't be THAT hard!?!? The Amstrad could cope.. Why can't my code!?!

. The Early Bracket Issue. Print (a+b)-c
This one's mostly down to the fact that the language tries to be as freeform as possible, and that's my own stupid fault.
Better parsing for this one, I think. Much like the Minus issue.

. If's mid-line. Better line-feed functionality required
I've tried tweaking this a few times, but usually end up reverting back because it breaks something else.
Adding an if mid-line is probably a no-no in modern coding, but .. heck I still do it sometimes, so I definitely need to account for it.

. Can you "Print GamepadHit or KeyHit or MouseHit" without brackets?
Currently you can't do this. It breaks because each of the commands thinks the next command is a parameter..
It's reading it as Print(GamepadHit(KeyHit(MouseHit))) which is obviously broken.
More parsing work required for this one.

. NOT
Nots are a truly baffling affair!!

. Tilemap Collisions
Definitely need to figure this stuff out.
It shouldn't be "too" hard, but I'll probably just end up making a few simple collision commands like I did for the other stuff.

. Finish off Handler + Writeup
Oops!!

. nth
Javascript has wonderful locale features.
If you ask for the current month-name, it does it based on the computer's current language.
But Ordinals..?
I can't find a foolproof method to get those working.
If you scour the internet, people seem to suggest making arrays or using functions to add st, nd, rd, etc.
But .. That's only English.
Or it's only in French..
There doesn't seem to be a universal Locale-based method, and that's annoying the munkies out of me!!!


And that's.. currently.. the complete todo list.
Obviously there's loads more commands to add, too, but for the most part, that's all the background tweaks that I need to make.
Right, that's plenty to be getting on with.
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