I haven't been keeping up with the board latley so if anyone else has already made any of these suggestions you have my apologies in advance.
Well I have an idea on how to make the debugging process a little quicker for the experts and a little less painful for the starters. I think that when you hit compile and it starts listing the errors they should be short and kept to a one line message minimum so the amount of scrolling down is minimized and you can get through the messages and fix the bugs quickly if you know what the messages mean. Then if you right click or hit F1 on one of the errors it brings up a more detailed description of the error along with common reasons for the bug and how to fix it since some of the error messages can be misleading to someone who hasn't dealt with the harsh ways of a compiler. I'm pretty sure when someone starts a language and actually trys to code something only to have it not work due to an error they can't figure out can be quite a pain and cause them to stop trying.
Another nice feature would be to have the syntax of a command popup near where your typing(like VB and I think the newer version of VC) or in a seperate pane(or if you favor slow computers have the syntax popup be hotkeyed) since most of the time I'm using help it's usually just for finding out what arguments go where and it's sorta slow loading up the help on older comps.
For anyone trying to contact me via ICQ I just got a new computer and I won't have ICQ running for another few days so if you wanna contact me do it via email.
ID:138450
 Aug 7 2000, 8:43 pm
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Aug 8 2000, 6:57 am
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Al
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On the forum would it be possible to have an edit button next to the delete button to make it quicker to make small changes to posts? (effectively take a copy of the old message, create a new message dialog with it and then delete the old messsage on posting the new one).
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You know what I want... the ability to copy from the error message window on the compiler. It's awful when I get a weird error message and have to keep flipping back and forth between the DM and the boards so that I can ask my lackey, Tom, what the heck is going on. It would be so much nicer to just copy and paste. But if it's not easy to implement, you have my permission not to.
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On 8/8/00 12:43 am Theodis wrote:
Well I have an idea on how to make the debugging process a little quicker for the experts and a little less painful for the starters. I think that when you hit compile and it starts listing the errors they should be short and kept to a one line message minimum so the amount of scrolling down is minimized and you can get through the messages and fix the bugs quickly if you know what the messages mean. Most of the error messages should be fairly short, but I can see how some of them might be confusing. They are borrowed from standard compiler syntax. I'm not too sure what we can do to improve things. My best advice is to just fix a few errors at a time. They have a way of propogating, so that oftentimes one simple syntax error can cause a lot of others to spring up (this is not the desired behavior, but I suspect it is a difficult problem to correct-- you'll have to ask Dan). Another nice feature would be to have the syntax of a command popup near where your typing(like VB and I think the newer version of VC) or in a seperate pane(or if you favor slow computers have the syntax popup be hotkeyed) since most of the time I'm using help it's usually just for finding out what arguments go where and it's sorta slow loading up the help on older comps. That's a neat idea. It's fairly tricky to do right though. I'll put it on the list of things to investigate. | |
On 8/8/00 10:57 am Al wrote:
On the forum would it be possible to have an edit button next to the delete button to make it quicker to make small changes to posts? (effectively take a copy of the old message, create a new message dialog with it and then delete the old messsage on posting the new one). Yes. I'm glad you brought this up because I have been making some big internal forum changes recently (I realized that this thing would be problematic with a larger load of messages), and this is one of the things I threw in. Good call. | |
On 8/8/00 11:20 am Zilal wrote:
You know what I want... the ability to copy from the error message window on the compiler. It's awful when I get a weird error message and have to keep flipping back and forth between the DM and the boards so that I can ask my lackey, Tom, what the heck is going on. It would be so much nicer to just copy and paste. But if it's not easy to implement, you have my permission not to. I think Al mentioned this today too! I'll put it in. | |
On 8/8/00 2:51 pm Tom H. wrote:
I think Al mentioned this today too! I'll put it in. Keep this up and you may be promoted from lackey to manservant! Z (I had to post... it always fascinates me when I can see that someone else is using the boards at the exact same time I am. I feel like we're in the same room together!) | |
On 8/8/00 2:54 pm Zilal wrote:
(I had to post... it always fascinates me when I can see that someone else is using the boards at the exact same time I am. I feel like we're in the same room together!) As we speak, Dan is coding up a very innovative chat server that kind of operates along this principle. It treats chat rooms like web pages hosted on your own machine (added bonus: they can actually contain web pages via browse()). So if we get enough users you could surf around the different chat "homes" and converse will the people at the various locales. He's also got some nifty npc inhabitants that can be incorporated in the homes. But I won't give too much away. It should all be quite fun! | |
Most of the error messages should be fairly short, but I can see how some of them might be confusing. They are borrowed from standard compiler syntax. I'm not too sure what we can do to improve things. Yep but some with the extra obsoletion warnings like the file save one take up a few lines and when I had to convert my CTF code to the newer version the error messages just spilled in. And this is where I usually have the hoards of bugs is when I wait awhile on updateing my code to the current version. | |