[Scilab-users] Exclamation mark in variable names

[Samuel Gougeon]

Le 27/05/2018 à 16:30, Wozai a écrit :
> Dear Samuel,
>
> my point is, it wasn't possible to execute "!A=1" in Scilab 5.x (without prepending
> a space) and IMHO one should really *improve* the situation in Scilab 6,
> rather than just restoring the status quo.

Thank you Wozai for having confirmed my reading of your messages.

What Jens and i see is that Scilab 6 has not kept a status quo: by 
removing "!" from allowed characters, and by not fixing this, Scilab 6 
is downgraded now for almost 3 years it is released. Unfortunately, this 
is not a status quo.

I definitively agree that improving Scilab is necessary. This is why i 
am involved in it. But i definitely disagree about the fact that what is 
considered as an improvement or a downgrade is the decision of one 
person or a very few people just declaring that "This is better than 
existing features. It must be changed!" (with a frequent trailing 
exclamation mark).

Other users than you and me, more numerous than you alone, could easily 
consider that keeping the usage of "!" as the history call is 
preferable, because they use to use it in other environments, and then 
would consider this change as a *regression*, not an improvement.

You seem to consider that using very occasionally a leading space to 
address a variable is really a big deal. But how many coders name 
preferably their variables with a leading "!" such that having to 
prepend a space actually becomes a big deal? I am sorry, but in all the 
external codes i had to work on for 20 years, variables with a leading 
"!" were rare enough that i don't remember having met a single one.

The usual way to propose an improvement is to post a wish on Bugzilla. 
Yours is welcome!

I let Clement pushing the fix for the parser, and i hope it will be 
straightforwardly merged.

I will wait 2-3 weeks before documenting the history recall and 
CTRL+Space completion
features in the Console page. If within this time it is decided to 
change for ":", the page won't
have to be possibly updated afterwards.

Samuel
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