Scratch Sections currently read Javascript expressions line-by-line from the textarea, but allow multi-line functions. Some mechanism to allow multi-line text strings to be entered would be useful. Javascript doesn't provide a mechanism for here documents, so doing so within the Objectsheet somehow would be nice.
Options include:
- add a here document marker, like in other languages. this allows intermixing the marker with other expressions in Scratch Sections, but is not Javascript, so would be unfamiliar and possibly confusing to people.
- Add a config to a Scratch Section that allows textOnly to be set/reset (via checkbox).
- Currently, configuring a Scratch Section as "offline" (via the sections menu) inhibits calculation of the section, which is good. But it does calculate it when it's loaded from a file (this is to allow them to be used as Initialization sections). Close, but no cigar.
- A "textOnly=1" or //DATA... as the first line could cause future calculations to stop, although that might be confusing too.