Modifying Kojo Itself - New Operators

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N N (guest) 19 Mar 2013 23:10

I am creating a homeschool-targeted programming curriculum based on Kojo for young students. However, I am finding that using the equal sign as an assignment operator can lead to confusion for students in its difference to traditional mathematical usage. I would like to create a different assignment operator to avoid this confusion.

In particular, I don't really need to change the equal sign assignment operator - I just want to put in another operator that does the same thing. Perhaps something like the old Pascal-style ":=" assignment operator.

It seems like this shouldn't be too hard but I really don't trust my programming skills to be able to do this without potentially causing some major problems somewhere.

How easy would this be and how might I go about doing this?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks & Best Regards,
NN

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N N (guest), 19 Mar 2013 23:10

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Re: Modifying Kojo Itself - New Operators

lalitp 20 Mar 2013 05:30

This seems tough to do in general.

Something like this is possible:

val a = createRef(10)
a := 20

But you still have the = in the first line, so this probably does not help?

Cheers,
- Lalit

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lalitp, 20 Mar 2013 05:30

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N N (guest) 20 Mar 2013 12:40

Well… what I essentially am after is the ability to have students be able to type something like

var a := 20

and having it do the same thing as

var a = 20

but building this into the Kojo system so that the students never have to see the guts of it.

I figured that since Scala does not use built in operators but instead uses method calls that it should be possible to create a new method in the Kojo platform that acts this way. But again, I don't feel very confident in my ability to do this without creating other problems somewhere.

Thanks again,
NN

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N N (guest), 20 Mar 2013 12:40

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lalitp 20 Mar 2013 14:53

Well… what I essentially am after is the ability to have students be able to type something like

var a := 20

and having it do the same thing as

var a = 20

I figured as much, but unfortunately I don't think that is possible in this context, where the left hand side is a special form involving the var keyword (it's maybe possible with macros, but I haven't yet had a chance to play with them).

But I could be missing something. Do you have some ideas on how to pull this off, in terms of protype Kojo code (or otherwise)? Don't worry about unintended side effects for now.

- Lalit

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lalitp, 20 Mar 2013 14:53

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