[squeakland] Stopping infinite loops in Etoys

Steve Thomas sthomas1 at gosargon.com
Wed Feb 24 01:32:48 EST 2010


Just discovered that Cmd-. (aka <command><period>) on Macintosh stops
currently running scripts and changes their state to pause. On a Windows and
XO I assume its Alt Key instead of Command Key.
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys_Shortcuts)
<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys_Shortcuts>

This is very useful when kids create scripts that lock up the system (this
happened to me when I was trying to teach kids how to make babies, or in
more politically correct terms: trying to model lemming behavior by having
the lemmings breed, but the kids got a real big kick out of me telling them
their homework was to make babies, it was a real motivator and motivation
trumps political correctness IMHO).  The problem was they would create a
script which would make a sibling copy of the lemming object when a male and
female touched, they would forget to add a pause script or move the lemmings
away from each other. We had to force quit Etoys to resolve the issue and it
was very frustrating for the kids.

Also another useful tip on this page is the multi-object select (Shift Click
and drag around the objects you want to select). This is useful for
alignment. To access alignment commands et al, click on the menu in the Halo
that appears around the multiple objects.

We should probably document both these items in the Manual, probably under
"User Interface Keyboard" and possibly scripting.

Stephen
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