Dyslexic GDScript add-on

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Godot Version

4.3

Question

how diffidult would it be to make an add-on that could replace operators like == with text like equals ?

I’m finding so far on my programming journey that my greatest debugging issues have all been very obvious mistakes in syntax that I don’t pickup on even after combing through the text because of my dyslexia. I swore I had the > correct on a code and debugged for hours before switching it to < just to see what would happen and wouldn’t you know it, that was the ONLY problem with the code.

after that experience, I downloaded OpenDyslexia font and applied it to the editor and it has helped. But I made the exact same mistake a week later.

My dyslexia has only been this bad since Covid, but I have an older brother who grew up with this type of dyslexia, and from what I understand it’s like the order of words gets scrambled, but usually the brain compensates overtime by picking up the first and last letters and unscrambling the rest intuitively, or just guessing based on the letters. Often the meaning of a word is substituted, so you may see the word cat, and try to say cat, but you say ‘kitty’ instead.

Sometimes I’m staring at a problem in my code and reading it out loud to myself and it takes a long time for me to realize that the symbols don’t match up with what I’m ‘reading’, its hard to describe.

Anyhow, I feel pretty confident saying its harder to tell when I’m doing with symbols, vs text. Text gives you way more clues. This might sound crazy but I can at = and == and just not see the difference for a while., but = and equals are obviously different things.

for other symbols I mix up - and =, + and *, and I think all those could be replaced with text.

I do mix up the brackets, colons, and periods and commas, but the context they exist in makes it easy to figure out and it’s rarely a problem. Thank god because I don’t think there is any way to change those.

Anyhow, I don’t know how to submit Ideas to the Github because I’m new to Git and it’s confusing, but I thought I would post it here for feedback and see what people think. Is this a feature that would be easy to implement? is there an add on for Godot or VSC that does this already?

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You could make a equal function. Not sure how much it helps though

func equal(a, b) -> bool:
    return a == b

if equal(2, 2):
    pass

Math symbols are pretty baked-in though, and most font ligatures make symbols like >= into ≥ which is probably worse. Maybe there is a ligature heavy font out there that helps outside of OpenDyslexic

Adding keywords is a hard sell, especially how many are needed to substitute math symbols. But we have seen not get adopted as a substitue to ! in many languages.

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I can’t help you with the problem, but I want to express my admiration for you! I have it in a very weak degree and it is very difficult for me to program. And you have it much stronger and you don’t give up and keep working. That’s very impressive.

(Dyslexia is sometimes called the disease of geniuses.)

I apologize for the off-topic.

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