OpenEuphoria

Re: Suggestion for pretty_print()

• Posted by Juergen Luethje <j.lue at gmx.de> Dec 03, 2005
• 494 views

Me wrote:

> Robert Craig wrote:
> 
>> Bernie Ryan wrote:
>>> While your at it; how about an option in the ex.err dump
>>> to turn off the mixing of the numbers in a text sequence.
>>> when I am looking at a crashed file I want to just see the
>>> text in large sequences instead of spending a half hour
>>> try to decipher character embedded with their numeric equivelents.
>> 
>> With pretty_print() the programmer gives me some idea of
>> how he wants his output to look. With an ex.err dump,
>> I don't know whether data should be displayed as a number
>> or as a character, so when the value is in the range of
>> an ASCII character, I display it both ways. This may be hard
>> to read, but it's better than if I guess wrong and display
>> a bunch of gibberish characters, or a bunch of ASCII codes,
>> forcing the programmer to pull out an ASCII chart and
>> decipher it.
>> 
>> It might be possible for me in the future to add a field to
>> the symbol table that says whether a variable is 
>> "almost certainly character", "almost certainly numeric" 
>> or "unknown", based on what I can tell from all the
>> assignments to it. I don't know how well that would work though.
> 
> Rob, how about this:
> You could ship Euphoria with the user defined type "string". In contrast
> to suggestions that had been made in the past concerning a "string"
> type, this would not mean any change of Euphoria's internal affairs
> during normal operation. People use a user defined "string" type anyway,
> and when using "without type check", there is no loss of speed.
> The advantage would be that in case of a crash, Euphoria knows what
> constants and variables are strings, and can display them accordingly.

The following is probably even better:
Provide a new keyword "string", which is just handled as an alias for 
"sequence" during normal operation. But the internal routine that writes
the ex.err dump can take advantage of the additional information which
sequence is a string.

<snip>

Regards,
   Juergen

PS: As a positive side-effect, declaring strings explicitely as "string"
    rather than as "sequence" increases the readability of the code.