Post by lokeloski in Lil Programming Questions

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Hey there! I've been redoing The Steppe code, following your suggestions on cohost, but I made a minor modification that seemed to have broken something.

So, there was an invisible field "counter" that would have its numeric text altered according to what card you came from, starting from 1. Then, there was a screen-sized invisible button that would take you to another card based on a giant "if... elseif" code. Your suggestion to simplify it would be to use lists. This was the example given:

cards:(card2,card3,card4,card5,card6,card7,card8)
trans:("n/a","WipeUp","Dissolve","Dissolve","Wink","Dissolve","CircleIn")
go[cards[counter.text-1] trans[counter.text-1]]

It was working well, but then I thought "maybe I could make the counter start from 0, instead of 1, so it would align with the list index on the 'go' and I can remove the -1". So I rewrote all the code for counter to go from 0 to 7 instead 1 to 8, and changed the "[counter.text-1]" to just "[counter.text]". Except now the button doesn't work properly, it just goes back to the home screen no matter the text in the field counter.

However, if put a +0, it works again. So, right now, it's like this:

cards:(card2,card3,card4,card5,card6,card7,card8) 
trans:("n/a","WipeUp","Dissolve","Dissolve","Wink","Dissolve","CircleIn") 
go[cards[counter.text+0] trans[counter.text+0]]

What I want to know is... am I doing something wrong? Is there another way to use counter.text as an index that I'm missing? I've been messing around with it for quite a while, but can't seem to solve this.

Internet Janitor135 days ago

The .text attribute of a Field is a string. Performing any sort of arithmetic operation on a string coerces it to a number (as a convenience), and in many places a string like "23" is fully interchangeable with the number 23:

 100+"23"    # 123

Unfortunately, indexing into lists isn't one of those places:

 foo:"Alpha","Beta","Gamma"
 foo[1]      # "Beta"
 foo["1"]    # 0
 foo[0+"1"]  # "Beta"

Part of the reason Lil draws a hard line here is that indexing lists by strings is one way to force them to "promote" to dictionaries when you assign through them; trying to parse strings into numbers could lead to some very nasty ambiguity:

 foo["z"]:"Delta"    # {0:"Alpha",1:"Beta",2:"Gamma","z":"Delta"}

I apologize for the confusion stemming from my suggestions.

One possible alternative would be to make "counter" a Slider widget instead of a Field; The value of a Slider is always a number.

lokeloski135 days ago(+1)

Ah, don't worry, you have nothing to apologize for! I thought this could be the case, but that might have had another workaround I wasn't figuring it out.

The code works perfectly now, so I'll keep it as-is with the +0 and write a small note that field.text is always a string, so I don't forget. Thanks for the help!

itch.io

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