Finding emojis useful for sporadic "grab-you by the jugular" icons, I'm now experimenting with Unicode characters for more numerous things I want grabbing my attention without doing so obnoxiously.
Note: I am experimenting with these as a way to help folk with cognitive/visual disabilities, to make it easier to locate/identify sections of code.
Emojis are pretty quick to access, at least on my Chromebook: right-click and click on emojis to access them in a dialog.
Unicode character access was requiring too many steps, so I've added a section for Unicode characters in the Lookups Window (in the menu: Tools - Lookups). This brings up the List of Unicode characters Wikipedia page, and provides a field in which you can copy/paste frequently used Unicode characters. (IF IT IS SOMETHING YOU WANT TO EXPERIMENT WITH TOO !!!)
EDIT:
A big reason I'm using GOTO's in this sample: getting old non-structured BASIC programs working in BASIC Anywhere Machine is a ton of fun, especially when exported programs can be shared as small HTML files on the web.
I see Unicode characters and emojis as a way to help see parts of these old BASIC programs in order to create structured versions of them.
The arrows make it a little easier to find/identify branching/flow, and that "STOP" character makes it really easy to pinpoint the END of the program.
This might also be useful for naming/locating variables.
ReplyDeleteFor example, it is pretty common to use one-letter variable names for variables used in loops.
Say the variable is "i", it is kind of hard to find all of the occurences of that variable in a program, because the letter "i" could appear anywhere.
However, if we name the variable with a prefix "⏶i", it would be likely unique while staying compact, and be easy to search for to find only exact matches.
For my mini-BASIC, Flag characters like ⚑ or 🚩 are like whitespace. This turns out to be much nicer than I anticipated; you can add or remove flags from a line of code to mark things you know you need to get back to, or lines that you want someone else to see.
ReplyDeleteWhat didn't work as well: I defined way too many flag characters as this special thing. Just a few (the red one is particularly nice) would be enough; I didn't need to go beyond and allow the ten or twenty different ones.
I also allow for "pretty math characters", so that ÷ and / both do the same thing.