Yves, Francois. I am actually begging you.

[Dines]

CompareIntegers$( "B", Focal View Workings A( "ENEMY" ), "<", Focal View Workings B( "ENEMY" ), CompareIntegers$( "B", Angle to Player( "ENEMY" ), ">=", Focal View Workings A( "ENEMY" ), CompareIntegers$( "B", Angle to Player( "ENEMY" ), "<=", Focal View Workings B( "ENEMY" ), "YES", "NO"), "NO"), CompareIntegers$( "B", Focal View Workings A( "ENEMY" ), ">", Focal View Workings B( "ENEMY" ), CompareIntegers$( "B", Angle to Player( "ENEMY" ), "<=", Focal View Workings A( "ENEMY" ), CompareIntegers$( "B", Angle to Player( "ENEMY" ), ">=", Focal View Workings B( "ENEMY" ), "YES", "NO"), "NO"), "Illegal Result, A and B are not different"))

Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please...

...when you've got all your big projects done, like HWA, V4, Blueray, Java Runtime, and so on...

...please give us some subtle alterations to the expression editor?


It would be nice if it could do the following:

1. remember exactly how we wrote the expression originally, including all whitespace (newlines, spacing, tabs, etc). Currently it strips whitespace and newlines.

2. handle comments, in /* */ and // formats. So this:

 //This is a dog
  "Dog" + 
 //This is a cat
  "Cat"
  /*And this is an inline comment*/

...would be a legal expression, evaluating the same as "Dog"+"Cat"


Complex expressions are very, very hard to work with in MMF, as you can see from the almost undiscernable lump I just quoted above. When I wrote it a few minutes ago, I had indented and spaced it so everything fell into nice easy chunks.

But now I've tested it, it's collapsed into this hideous mess. I've subsequently found an error in it, and now I have to try and strip it all back to change the correct bit. It would have taken only a matter of seconds if MMF had remembered my formatting.

Please, just trust me, as a person who's been using click products for 10 years now, you NEED to add this. TGF can cope without it, but you actually market MMF towards power users, and power users need this.

Up till now, we've got away with just writing complex formulae in notepad and copying it over. But that's not always viable.

PLEASE, in my opinion this is a crucially important update to add. It's not urgent, so I'm not asking you to drop any other projects to do it. But it does need to be done sooner or later.

Can anyone else back me up on this?

[Jeff]

I think its a great idea!

[neat_Kliker2]

would cut down on the amount of comments needed

[Brandon]

Yes, I run into this problem sometimes also. The only thing I actually really think is completely necessary is the ability to add "" into text lines without loading it from a string object. For example try entering a sentence into the expression editor and then put quotes ("") around a word and you will get a syntax error.

[neat_Kliker2]

use "lol " + """", works fine

[Brandon]

Yes, but sometimes that isn't a plausible method, as I have run into situations where I can't use that for the same effect.

[James]

If MMF just supported standard escape sequences like \n and \"..

[Dines]

I'd especially appreciate the whitespace thing, even more than comments.

One thing that's less likely, although it'd rock no end, would be if you could combine separate expressions into one, using local variables (so the expression can define its own internal variables, used just within that expression, to make the formulae simpler).

E.g. you could do:

1 + 1 = n;

n + 1

MMF would look for semicolons, and process each semicolonned 'sentence' as a separate equation, lodging the result in the variable name given after the equals sign.

So the above would be like you had written (1+1)+1.

A good example of its use is in equations like Bézier curves, where the same bits of equation gets repeated several times, eg:

xpos("P1") = p1;
xpos("P2") = p2;
xpos("P3") = p3;
time_value("Pen") = t;

p1 + (p2-p1) * t = q1;
p2 + (p3-p2) * t = q2;

q1 + (q2-q1) * t

Would give the same as:

(xpos("P1") + (xpos("P2")-xpos("P1")) * time_value("Pen")) + ((xpos("P2") + (xpos("P3")-xpos("P2")) * time_value("Pen"))-(xpos("P1") + (xpos("P2")-xpos("P1")) * time_value("Pen"))) * time_value("Pen")

...I prefer the first one

[neat_Kliker2]

but then again Dines, that would changed MMF into a scripting engine like PHP, MMF2 is ment for point and click

[xyzzy]

but then again Dines, that would changed MMF into a scripting engine like PHP, MMF2 is ment for point and click

it wouldn't be a bad idea if MMF2 did have a scripting language, and a user could choose between whether they wanted to use P&C or the script, based on their preferences