stam wrote: ↑Thu Mar 17, 2022 4:03 pm
Samuele wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:07 pm
ordinate and abscissa start from the top left and not from the bottom left, so that makes things quite different.
It's only "different" if you've never touched a programming language before.
This is a widely accepted convention across
all programming languages, not a livecode specific thing.
Top Left is always 0,0, bottom right is max,max
In all fairness to Samuele and others new to programming, we're all new the beginning. And the arbitrary oddities of OSes and the software that runs on them is often counterintuitive.
While display devices used by software do indeed often require the 0,0 origin point be in the upper-left, we can appreciate that this is different from the only other context in which most folks encounter coordinate systems, math class.
From our earliest days in grade school we're trained to plot coordinates from bottom-left. That is, until we get into programming, where everything is literally upside down in this regard.
Complicating cognition further is that Turtle Graphics is how many are introduced to graphical algorithmic thinking, but there 0,0 is the in center of the workspace.
This unintuitive departure from Cartesia makes sense from the perspective of a device driver rasterizer, but how many newcomers are writing display drivers?
In a move as maddening as it might have seemed noble at the time, PostScript - one of the most popular rendering systems in use - has its 0,0 at bottom-left.
Of course, very few beyond those who spent a moment in the '90s sending PostScript instructions directly to their then-new laser printer to see how it works (guilty as charged) will ever hand-write that language. But that the designers of that system sought a return to Cartesian thinking reminds us how we were trained in youth, and how many other things in computing require us to think in novel ways to accommodate a machine ultimately too stupid to count past 1.
With LiveCode in particular, we hope to see more surprise as Samuele's. It is, after all, aiming to expand on the xTalk tradition of making programming available to experts in domains beyond programming.
Of course this still needs to be learned, OSes being how they are. But hopefully we can muster a little patience as we share that knowledge.