My suggestions were merely so that users do not end up resetting stored data. Cheaters will always find ways to cheat in games. I'm all for learning by viewing other people's code. Likewise with the archive idea. It is way to easy to delete the contents of a program at the moment, not to mention the entire list of programs in the catalog. At least with the archive feature it prevents accidents like this. The archive feature does not prevent users from viewing code -- they just have to take a few extra steps to do it so that they don't end up with a null-content program.
I don't really care about cheating. You're right it's impossible to prevent it and anyway, it's fun to make games, it's fun to play them, if anyone find fun to cheat, great, we're entertaining a lot of people ! ^^
A real permanent storage or archive, would be welcome yes, but I see it more to actually store data, than to prevent data loss from opening programs. Opening a program should not reset user data at all, in my mind. And this permanent storage already exists, this is User Variable. If only we could create data in it.
It is true also that it is too easy to delete or alter programs.
Yeah I don't like the idea of closed-source myself since it prevents people from learning as much. Such password protection would only be a las resort solution to the accidental openings of source. I prefer that HP just fixes super global vars so they remain intact until reformatting the calc.
Right now, a Zelda game for the Prime is impossible without weird workarounds
I agree, when a workaround, even weird, is the only solution, then it's a good solution, obviously. I was talking about actually fixing things in next OS version, instead of implementing workarounds, you see what I mean ?
Or just something like EXPORT +[varname] for saved vars if they don't want to make saving over compilation default.
You mean telling the compiler to store a variable elsewhere so that it's not reset at next compilation ? If yes, not a bad idea for a lot of cases, a problem is if you modify the program enough so that the variables you stored don't make sense anymore with your new code. Storing data outside of the code is better I think.