Pikchr

more differences from PIC
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more differences from PIC

(1) By Michael Thornburgh (zenomt) on 2023-08-13 21:43:57 [source]

i noticed a few differences missing from the Differences Between Pikchr And Legacy-PIC page that i think would be valuable to add, both for reference and for learners.

  • scale behaves differently: in PIC all dimensions are divided by scale, whereas in Pikchr all dimensions are multiplied by scale. i think the Pikchr way (that is, multiply) is more intuitive (though there are good arguments for both ways), but since it's the opposite of PIC it should probably be called out on the Differences page.
  • Pikchr doesn't have Here (PIC: "The reserved name Here may be used to refer to the current position."). i'm not requesting for it to be added to Pikchr, and i'm not sure how useful it is, but calling out its absence wouldn't hurt.
  • Pikchr has this, which i don't think is documented. i discovered it looking in pikchr.y while wanting to express "make this box's height the same as another box's after fitting this box to interior text, but not too small to fit the interior text". it's possible there's a way to do it without this, but with this it's trivial: box "Some" "Text" fit height max(this.height, AnotherBox.height) . calling out the existence and utility of this, both on the Differences page and in the Language Spec page would be useful.
  • arrowhead doesn't do anything in Pikchr. this is mentioned in the "statement" page, but mentioning it on the Differences page would be useful.
  • Pikchr doesn't restore variables when exiting a [] to as they were before entering. this is called out in the User Manual page, but i think it should be called out on the Differences and Language Spec pages too since it's such a substantial difference from PIC.

(2) By anonymous on 2024-07-31 11:31:10 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

Could this be integrated into the list of differences in the documentation assuming the points are valid? I tried using scale for example and the behavior was somewhat ... unexpected compared to the description in the PIC paper linked on the main page.

(3) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2024-07-31 12:21:14 in reply to 2 [link] [source]

Could this be integrated into the list of differences in the documentation ...

Done. Thank you for the reminder.

(4) By anonymous on 2024-07-31 12:41:55 in reply to 3 [link] [source]

Thank you :)

Small typo: diminsions