diagnostics

[berndg]

Anyone who ever wrote a compiler or interpreter knows that the easiest error recovery tool reports "an error occurred at line X," and knows that meaningful error messages aren't cheap and aren't easy. I think LiveCode has lowered the standards to a new level though. Just try a simple mistake of declaring a routine as a function but calling it as a command (i.e. the caller does not put the result anywhere). I forget the exact words; I think it is something like "script error at line Y (column X)" (where, to add insult to injury, the column number does not match the visually perceived column number subject to tabs and whitespaces (I think)).

As stated in a previous post, I enjoy exploring LiveCode because it is different and novel to me, but I seriously can't see what the folks at runrev have been doing for five major versions.

[mwieder]

Points mostly well taken (but do take a look at PowerDebug's runtime error handling <g>). However, I just tried what I think is your example:

Code: Select all

on mouseUp
  grunt
end mouseUp

function grunt
  answer "hello"
end grunt

and got an error 573 on line 2 in handler mouseUp, which is "can't find handler".

[dunbarx]

Column number? What and where are these? I requested an x-value gauge long ago, since counting chars is, as you say, tedious.

[mwieder]

Craig-

I believe that's exactly the point of the OP's "(I think)".

[jacque]

Column number = character offset in the line.

[mwieder]

The point being that there's no ruler along the bottom to tell you the character position in the line. You have to guess at it or count chars, which isn't easy when you're trying to guess how many spaces a line is indented or other whitespace chars... not to mention being a pita.

[jacque]

Ah right. Sorry. My head is so pointy that other people's points just slide right off.

[FourthWorld]

The point being that there's no ruler along the bottom to tell you the character position in the line.

It seems being a MetaCard user has me at a disadvantage on this: in MC, when you open a script editor from the ExecErr dialog it places the insertion point right before the offending token.

Does this not happen in LC?

[mwieder]

I do that from PowerDebug if the user is running glx2 as a script editor, but otherwise the IDE's script editor only lets me specify the line number, not the character position.