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LabVIEW Idea Exchange

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smmarlow

Color Comment Text Inside Formula Nodes

Status: Declined

National Instruments will not be implementing this idea. We are not investing efforts in cosmetic improvements to the Formula Node in LabVIEW. Also, the C Node in LabVIEW NXG includes support for automatic color-coding of text content.

Searched and didn't find this.  I know you can format the text manually.  Comments should be colorized automatically.

 

formual node.png

8 Comments
Knight of NI

I don't normally use formula nodes or script nodes, but on the rare occasion that I use them, I would also like this to be included. Thanks for posting the idea.

Manzolli
Active Participant

The idea can be extended to highlight more elements, like many C language source code editors. Kudos!

André Manzolli

Mechanical Engineer
Certified LabVIEW Developer - CLD
LabVIEW Champion
Curitiba - PR - Brazil
smmarlow
Member

@Manzolli Yes!  perhaps the function names could be color coded as well!  Great Idea!

 

tom.huo
Member

This is a great idea, and it can be extented to many other languages.

GrantM
NI Employee (retired)

As you may be aware, the LabVIEW MathScript node has support for syntax highlighting.  However, the formula node and other textual nodes in LabVIEW currently do not.  Since the formula node has a relatively simple syntax, this shouldn't be too difficult to implement.  We will definitely keep it in mind when feature planning in a future LabVIEW release.

Grant M.
Senior Software Engineer | LabVIEW MathScript | National Instruments

ozimmer
Member

 

I would like to mention another argument in favor of Syntax highlighting within formula & expression nodes.

 

In LabVIEW, localized decimal separators do not apply to number entries within formula and expression nodes. The very bad thing is : if one mistakingly hits coma instead of dot while entering a number, the input may be considered a complex instead of a real number, with no warning issued, probably no fatal calculation error, but probably a hard to track calculation error bias due to fractional part of a constant not taken into acount.

 

LabVIEW syntax error detection & prevention is very good in general, but very poor in this particular case. Visual type indication within expression nodes could help avoiding this trap ??

 

oz

Ray.R
Knight of NI

Great idea!  Kudos!

Darren
Proven Zealot
Status changed to: Declined

National Instruments will not be implementing this idea. We are not investing efforts in cosmetic improvements to the Formula Node in LabVIEW. Also, the C Node in LabVIEW NXG includes support for automatic color-coding of text content.