colorlib coordination

Yesterday, I was thinking how I probably should have coded the "colorlib" extension so that it saved and checked the input color (what the player types), too. I pretty much skipped it since, in my experience, it is not used a whole lot, but Robb Sherwin has used it a couple times in his games to nice effect.

It would have been nice had I coded it right the first time, but oh well. Anyhow, the main reason I'm posting here is to share a bit of advice that I learned in my colorlib-writing process. If you create a global variable meant to hold color values (example: TEXTCOLOR, MENU_TEXTCOLOR, etc.), it is best to define it with a default value, like:

global TEXTCOLOR = DEF_FOREGROUND

(TEXTCOLOR is defined this way. MENU_TEXTCOLOR is not.)

The importance of this is because later on, you might want to check if a global has a value, but this is easily confused by the fact that the color BLACK equals 0. Giving it a default value (default interpreter color constants range from 16 to 20) ensures that a 0 value always means BLACK.