Variables find a home, and on to coding!

I sketched a new idea about where variables could go.  I was envisioning filling the space in the bottom right of the screen which is often blank.  There would be a gallery similar to in the scene editor which contained all the available characters and then a tab for characters and variables specific to a certain method.

Then there could also be  a search tab for finding characters that share a particular behavior.  These could all be grabbed as a collection with a make collection button.
One interesting thing about this is that number variables would be treated the same as character variables in the sense that they can be selected and dragged into place.  In order for this to work, adding procedure and function tabs to number variables would be necessary.  There could be draggable procedures for assignment, incrementing and decrementing and other common uses for variables.
After talking with Caitlin, we agreed that the big gallery concept would be too similar to the gallery in the scene editor.  Reusing that part of the interface with disimilar functionality would be confusing to the users.  Also, it would create two locations in the coding interface that both control which actions and questions are being shown.  We came up with a mini-gallery that would only contain variables local to a method (including numbers) and would appear right above the drop down.  This way, the user looks in the same place for things to select, and variables are much more visible.

With a good outline of the implicit interfaces idea, I was able to press on to coding.  My first steps are to ask questions about a loop variable such as what methods have been called on it, and then what objects in the scene have those methods.  I’m able to find all the methods called on a loop variable.  I’m also able to determine what other methods are available for that loop variable, but only because currently the loop variables are assigned a type.  I’m currently investigating how to get to the methods of the objects in the ForEach array, but it’s proving difficult since they are stored as “Objects” and then cast to whatever type is specified in the ForEach loop. It’s looking like some more heavy duty changes are in the future.