I’m going through this textbook on evoluationary game theory using NetLogo. Many of the models include a payoff matrix input currently represented as a list. It would be nice to have a matrix input widget (when using the matrix extension) which would provide something similar to a small spreadsheet to input all the values of a matrix. The global variable created by that widget could then directly be a matrix instead of needing to convert from a string to a list and from a list to a matrix. Speaking of, is there a reason we can’t input lists directly and instead have to use strings and then convert them to lists?
I like this idea, although it might not be the best idea to add widgets to an extension while we’re rethinking whether or not extensions should be able to do things like that. One potential compromise is to add a new widget type that allows you to create a global that contains a transformation of another global. This seems generally applicable, so it wouldn’t be associated with an extension, but you could use it to generate a matrix from an input widget.
Regarding inputting lists directly, do you mean in the existing input widget? If so, there’s no technical restriction on that, I think it was just a design decision so as to not have too many different input types.