Lingo in a Nutshell

Space-Sensitivity

Lingo code is often whitespace-insensitive (that is, it ignores extra Space, Tab, and Return characters). Director ignores any spaces you type at the beginning of a line of Lingo. It indents each line of code in the current code block (such as an if...then...else...end if statement two spaces) from the surrounding code. Use the Tab key to auto-format your Lingo code with proper indenting. Use the auto-indenting as your guide to indicate possible structural errors. (See Chapter 1.) You can add spaces within your lines and blank lines to your Lingo scripts to make them more readable.

JavaScript scripts and HTML tags also tend to be space-insensitive.

Many aspects of Lingo and Director are space-sensitive, however.

The following must not include any spaces:

• Handler names

• Variable names

• Symbol names

• Windows 3.1 filenames

• Windows 95 filenames can not begin with a space but may contain spaces elsewhere

• Xtras names and methods; the name of the external Xtras file can have spaces (except under Windows 3.1), but not the internal name by which Xtras are accessed

• XObject names and methods (see previous note for Xtras)

• Lingo keywords

• e-mail addresses

• Do not include spaces at the end of a line after the Lingo continuation character ¬.

• URLs—use %20 in lieu of spaces

The following allow spaces, but they are space-sensitive, including any leading or trailing spaces:

• The FileIO Xtra under Windows does not differentiate names with spaces from similar names without space.

• String comparison

• External ...