Adding the italics to the comment font looks good to me also.

Dave

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 04:02:21PM -0600, Lauren P wrote:

Seconded.

On Fri, May 13, 2022, 11:24 tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:

...

I find it very hard to discern the colour used by Shout for comments in the SqueakTheme. I would like to suggest that we change to make it italic as well as coloured.

If we edit SqueakTheme class>>#addSyntaxHighlighting: where we set the comment style - set: #comment for: #SHTextStylerST80 to: {Color cyan muchDarker. TextEmphasis italic};

and then run `self create apply` in the browser then things are more visible.

tim

tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Trancelators interpret messages from the dead

Hi all,

-0.5. :-)

No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code.

Regarding unterminated comments, which are rendered as italic indeed at the moment, I never found it intuitive that something becomes italic because you forget a missing quote. Maybe we could remove this emphasis as well. We also do not apply special emphasis to unterminated expressions with a missing closing bracket.

Best,

Christoph

________________________________ Von: Squeak-dev squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org im Auftrag von Taeumel, Marcel Gesendet: Montag, 16. Mai 2022 17:05:23 An: squeak-dev Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Improving visibility of comments in Shout renders code within SqueakTheme

Hi Lauren, hi Dave, hi Tim --

Well, I am not strongly against this (anymore) since we fixed italic rendering at least for TrueType fonts.

I am leaning towards adding an "italic comments" preference as I like the current appearance... Hmm....

Note that the effect of an invalid Shout identifier would then not be so strong anymore. Red and italic are current indications of that.

Well, the "Community (dark)" theme does this already.

+/- 0 :-)

Best, Marcel

Am 14.05.2022 16:44:59 schrieb David T. Lewis lewis@mail.msen.com:

Adding the italics to the comment font looks good to me also.

Dave

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 04:02:21PM -0600, Lauren P wrote:

Seconded.

On Fri, May 13, 2022, 11:24 tim Rowledge wrote:

...

I find it very hard to discern the colour used by Shout for comments in the SqueakTheme. I would like to suggest that we change to make it italic as well as coloured.

If we edit SqueakTheme class>>#addSyntaxHighlighting: where we set the comment style - set: #comment for: #SHTextStylerST80 to: {Color cyan muchDarker. TextEmphasis italic};

and then run `self create apply` in the browser then things are more visible.

tim

tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Trancelators interpret messages from the dead

Fair point. From an accessibility perspective, italic wins. :-)

Best,

Christoph

________________________________ Von: Squeak-dev squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org im Auftrag von Taeumel, Marcel Gesendet: Montag, 16. Mai 2022 18:31:12 An: squeak-dev Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Improving visibility of comments in Shout renders code within SqueakTheme

I never found it intuitive that something becomes italic because you forget a missing quote.

Because you are better with colors than some of us? =)

Best, Marcel

Am 16.05.2022 18:12:38 schrieb Thiede, Christoph christoph.thiede@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:

Hi all,

-0.5. :-)

No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code.

Regarding unterminated comments, which are rendered as italic indeed at the moment, I never found it intuitive that something becomes italic because you forget a missing quote. Maybe we could remove this emphasis as well. We also do not apply special emphasis to unterminated expressions with a missing closing bracket.

Best,

Christoph

________________________________ Von: Squeak-dev squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org im Auftrag von Taeumel, Marcel Gesendet: Montag, 16. Mai 2022 17:05:23 An: squeak-dev Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Improving visibility of comments in Shout renders code within SqueakTheme

Hi Lauren, hi Dave, hi Tim --

Well, I am not strongly against this (anymore) since we fixed italic rendering at least for TrueType fonts.

I am leaning towards adding an "italic comments" preference as I like the current appearance... Hmm....

Note that the effect of an invalid Shout identifier would then not be so strong anymore. Red and italic are current indications of that.

Well, the "Community (dark)" theme does this already.

+/- 0 :-)

Best, Marcel

Am 14.05.2022 16:44:59 schrieb David T. Lewis lewis@mail.msen.com:

Adding the italics to the comment font looks good to me also.

Dave

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 04:02:21PM -0600, Lauren P wrote:

Seconded.

On Fri, May 13, 2022, 11:24 tim Rowledge wrote:

...

I find it very hard to discern the colour used by Shout for comments in the SqueakTheme. I would like to suggest that we change to make it italic as well as coloured.

If we edit SqueakTheme class>>#addSyntaxHighlighting: where we set the comment style - set: #comment for: #SHTextStylerST80 to: {Color cyan muchDarker. TextEmphasis italic};

and then run `self create apply` in the browser then things are more visible.

tim

tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Trancelators interpret messages from the dead

On 2022-05-16, at 6:30 PM, Chris Muller asqueaker@gmail.com wrote:

No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code.

Interesting, this is actually why I use italic for comments. It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer. Italics is often used in writing for referring to external quotations, which enhance the thing being written about. It seems like a perfect fit, to me.

Yup. And quite a lot of us are likely to be somewhat red/green colour blind too. Multiple signalling is a good thing.

tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Homeopathy: Logic diluted, to make it stronger....

Hi Chris --

It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.

Not quite. Anybody can write something that the computer can understand. Good source code, however, is something humans can easily understand. In Smalltalk, good code can almost read like a sentence in natural language. It's a challenge, but it is often possible.

As for comments, bad ones are possibly full of slang, proverbs, and other stuff that "human-speak" might reveal. Good comments are kind of structured and explanatory. Thus, closer to what might sometimes be almost source code.

Consequently, putting effort in making comments strongly distinct from source code is counterproductive to what we actually want to achieve here. I think. :-)

Best, Marcel Am 17.05.2022 03:31:21 schrieb Chris Muller asqueaker@gmail.com: No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code. Interesting, this is actually why I use italic for comments.  It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.  Italics is often used in writing for referring to external quotations, which enhance the thing being written about.  It seems like a perfect fit, to me.

On 2022-05-17, at 9:52 AM, Benoit St-Jean via Squeak-dev squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:

Comments are sometimes *necessary*, no matter how clear, concise and simple the Smalltalk code might look.

For instance, the code to generate the A328022 OEIS integer sequence is pretty straightforward and simple in Smalltalk code. But unless a *comment* tells you what the code is trying to achieve, you'd have a hard time understanding what's going on...

So I favor comments in *italic* (as they stand out a lot more than "sentences in between quotes") as sometimes Smalltalk code cannot tell you the whole story the way a simple comment can do.

Exactly; comments can explain what the *intent* is, whereas code tells you what it actually does. It's just that quite often the code doesn't actually do everything one might have wanted, or not provide much clue what it is useful for, or what paper's algorithm it is trying to implement etc.

There's also a more prosaic reason for wanting more distinct comments - when one has commented out a large chunk of code when debugging it is quite useful for it to be really obvious which bits don't get run! Yes, large swathes of code should not generally be written but some days you just have to debug the horrible wall of text you are given. And given a need for this distinction, it helps if it is reasonably distinct for most users, so consider people with colour blindness, or poor acuity. In fact right now (as in I'm on a zoom meeting) I'm working on a project that is trying to make it possible for variously visually impaired users to 'view' large info-dump type documents with tables and images. I have to admit that making the text italic is not one of the techniques under consideration :-)

tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Computing Dictionary: LOOP: (go to LOOP)

Hi all --

Done. See preference #enforceItalicEmphasisInComments.

Best, Marcel Am 02.07.2022 20:00:17 schrieb Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda@gmail.com:

On May 17, 2022, at 9:52 AM, Benoit St-Jean via Squeak-dev squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:

 Comments are sometimes *necessary*, no matter how clear, concise and simple the Smalltalk code might look. +1

For instance, the code to generate the A328022 OEIS integer sequence is pretty straightforward and simple in Smalltalk code.  But unless a *comment* tells you what the code is trying to achieve, you'd have a hard time understanding what's going on...

+1

So I favor comments in *italic* (as they stand out a lot more than  "sentences in between quotes") as sometimes Smalltalk code cannot tell you the whole story the way a simple comment can do.

+1

Amen.  I agree 100%

On 2022-05-17 05:16, Marcel Taeumel wrote:

Hi Chris --

It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.

Not quite. Anybody can write something that the computer can understand. Good source code, however, is something humans can easily understand. In Smalltalk, good code can almost read like a sentence in natural language. It's a challenge, but it is often possible.

As for comments, bad ones are possibly full of slang, proverbs, and other stuff that "human-speak" might reveal. Good comments are kind of structured and explanatory. Thus, closer to what might sometimes be almost source code.

Consequently, putting effort in making comments strongly distinct from source code is counterproductive to what we actually want to achieve here. I think. :-)

Best, Marcel Am 17.05.2022 03:31:21 schrieb Chris Muller asqueaker@gmail.com [mailto:asqueaker@gmail.com]: No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code. Interesting, this is actually why I use italic for comments.  It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.  Italics is often used in writing for referring to external quotations, which enhance the thing being written about.  It seems like a perfect fit, to me.

-- ----------------- Benoît St-Jean Yahoo! Messenger: bstjean Twitter: @BenLeChialeux Pinterest: benoitstjean Instagram: Chef_Benito IRC: lamneth GitHub: bstjean Blogue: endormitoire.wordpress.com "A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero". (A. Einstein)

It's confusing me a bit that the enclosing quotes are not   italicized as well. But this seems to be a problem with the pre-rendered fonts in Squeak, I guess.

Maybe. I might as well be exactly how the font designer intended it to look like. We cannot know in general. Well, for italic glyphs auto-generated from another StrikeFont, there is some code to look at.

Best, Marcel Am 09.07.2022 16:28:38 schrieb christoph.thiede@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de christoph.thiede@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de: It's confusing me a bit that the enclosing quotes are not italicized as well. But this seems to be a problem with the pre-rendered fonts in Squeak, I guess.

Best, Christoph

--- Sent from Squeak Inbox Talk [https://github.com/hpi-swa-lab/squeak-inbox-talk]

On 2022-07-03T12:02:30+02:00, marcel.taeumel@hpi.de wrote:

Hi all --

Done. See preference #enforceItalicEmphasisInComments.

Best, Marcel Am 02.07.2022 20:00:17 schrieb Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>:

On May 17, 2022, at 9:52 AM, Benoit St-Jean via Squeak-dev <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> wrote:

Comments are sometimes *necessary*, no matter how clear, concise and simple the Smalltalk code might look. +1

For instance, the code to generate the A328022 OEIS integer sequence is pretty straightforward and simple in Smalltalk code.  But unless a *comment* tells you what the code is trying to achieve, you'd have a hard time understanding what's going on...

+1

So I favor comments in *italic* (as they stand out a lot more than  "sentences in between quotes") as sometimes Smalltalk code cannot tell you the whole story the way a simple comment can do.

+1

Amen.  I agree 100%

On 2022-05-17 05:16, Marcel Taeumel wrote:

Hi Chris --

...

It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.

Not quite. Anybody can write something that the computer can understand. Good source code, however, is something humans can easily understand. In Smalltalk, good code can almost read like a sentence in natural language. It's a challenge, but it is often possible.

As for comments, bad ones are possibly full of slang, proverbs, and other stuff that "human-speak" might reveal. Good comments are kind of structured and explanatory. Thus, closer to what might sometimes be almost source code.

Consequently, putting effort in making comments strongly distinct from source code is counterproductive to what we actually want to achieve here. I think. :-)

Best, Marcel Am 17.05.2022 03:31:21 schrieb Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> [mailto:asqueaker at gmail.com]: No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code. Interesting, this is actually why I use italic for comments.  It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.  Italics is often used in writing for referring to external quotations, which enhance the thing being written about.  It seems like a perfect fit, to me.

-- ----------------- Benoît St-Jean Yahoo! Messenger: bstjean Twitter: @BenLeChialeux Pinterest: benoitstjean Instagram: Chef_Benito IRC: lamneth GitHub: bstjean Blogue: endormitoire.wordpress.com "A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero". (A. Einstein)

On May 16, 2022, at 6:31 PM, Chris Muller asqueaker@gmail.com wrote:



...

No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code.

Interesting, this is actually why I use italic for comments. It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer. Italics is often used in writing for referring to external quotations, which enhance the thing being written about. It seems like a perfect fit, to me.

+1