It's a HyperCard compatibility thing. There were no adverbs in HC anywhere. American speakers use "ly"... consistently and properly.
I wasn't casting aspersions in any way on American English - I was more trying to verify whether in American English it is common to not use an adverb in the kinds of contexts we are talking about - e.g. 'I flipped the image horizontal', rather than 'I flipped the image horizontally'.
Synonoyms would be fine. I'm not particularly married to avoiding adverbs, I just don't want to have to remember two different types of syntax and keep track of which commands use adverbs and which ones don't. Mostly I was just teasing you, but I do think consistency is important.
Well, that's the thing - it would be better not to have two different types of syntax... So if the adverb forms are considered better and more expressive, isn't a relatively small change (i.e. reprogrammaing
) to move to using adverbs in all situations it would be better if they were there.
For that matter, I think it would be fine if you add synonyms for all those words you want to spell with an additional "u". Then you can, for example, get the colournames.
After all, we have hilite and highlight and hilight and who knows what else.
This has been suggested before, but in terms of adding synonyms for the British English forms then I think it might just be too subtle. It works for things like 'the behaviour of control ...', but it would still have to be 'behavior' when returned in 'the properties'. Obviously there are lots of synonyms at the moment, but they are usually either contractions or for convenience and there's generally always an obvious one which is considered to be the principal one.
It would be nice if it were possible to tag locale based equivalents in the engine and present them appropriately depending on the authors locale both in the dictionary and in scripts... I guess that's a reasonable size project though.
Doing something like this would be feasible, and would perhaps work fine for syntax but as properties (and messages) are dynamic you have the issue of in some cases having to use the 'principal' form and if the differences between them are subtle (like an added 'u') then it might cause more problems than it solves.
Talking about deprecation... what would need to be done in order to highlight deprecated syntax in the script editor (red & crossed out)?
I think there's at least initial support in the dictionary for this - I'm pretty sure there's a possibility for expressing it in the XML files. I'll have to check with @runrevelanor.
