Creating Your Own Functions

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Introduction

Yes, LiveCode comes with hundreds of commands, functions, and procedures. But, you can also create your own. It's like teaching LiveCode a new word to add to its "vocabulary." So, if LiveCode doesn't do something you want, you can create your own function to accomplish it. And, by creating a function you can easily reuse it over and over in your program.

Here's a simple example just to demonstrate the technique. The function merely adds 5 to whatever number the user enters and return the result. Here's the code to add to a button:

 function AddSome num1  
  add 5 to num1  
  return num1  
 end AddSome  

 on mouseUp  
   ask "Give me a number:"  
   put AddSome(it) into field "message"  
 end mouseUp  

Another Example: Calculating the Number of Consonants

Here's another example that is a little bit more useful. This example takes any word and returns the number consonants in that word. Here's the code to add to a button:

 function addUpConsonants theWord  
   put "aeiou" into theVowels  
   put 0 into varCount  
  repeat for each char i in theWord  
   if i is not in theVowels then add 1 to varCount  
  end repeat  
  return varCount  
 end addUpConsonants  
   
 on mouseUp  
   ask "Give me a word:"  
   put addUpConsonants(it) into field "message"  
 end mouseUp