[MWForum]MicroWorlds Reference Card

[Wendy Petti]

Thanks, Jeff and Karen, for your contributions to our discussion.  Daniel
presented an abbreviated version of our discussions, and in fact I too had
wondered if we should consider listing some primitives in more than one
category for the reason that you suggest, Jeff.

There is a footnote on the first page of the card noting that our Quick
Reference Card is based on LCSI's categorization scheme.  Most of the
general categories are drawn straight from the MW vocabulary organization
found in the help menu; our contribution is mostly the subcategories.  I
very much like the category of "conditionals" that you recall from the early
Apple Logo card, Jeff.  It seems to me that if we developed a category of
"conditionals," then "when" and "waituntil" would be in that category, but
primitives such as "forever" and "stopall" would not be.  Daniel has
explained why he likes to place "when" with "launch" and "forever" and
"waituntil" with "stopall" and "stopme."  With a "conditionals" category,
some of these other connections would be lost, unless, as Jeff suggests, we
place some primitives in more than one category... and this would be an
example of the value of some multiple listings.

I agree that it makes sense to state the meaning of abbreviations; we could
place the meaning in another font or smaller font size or maybe italics or
brackets so the user would understand that these meanings are not
interchangeable primitives.  In other words, RIGHT 90 and RT 90 are both
legitimate (interchangeable) commands, but we cannot type CLEAR GRAPHICS,
only CG; we can make this distinction clear with our formatting.

Karen, many of us are unable to open an Appleworks document.  I'm working on
it but haven't managed to open it yet.  Is it something you could copy and
paste into a text message or translate into a PDF file or a Word document?

Wendy