OpenEuphoria

Re: Suggestion for pretty_print()

• Posted by Juergen Luethje <j.lue at gmx.de> Dec 04, 2005
• 485 views

Vincent wrote:

> Robert Craig wrote:
> 
>> It's a bit cluttered, but does it warrant a 
>> new language feature just to reduce the clutter?
> 
> No it doesn't, because we can just use Juergen's error dump library to
> disambiguate ACSII characters from their numeric values.

Thanks.   However ...

... we also need e.g.
- my "Lfn.zip" library to use long file names on DOS
- Greg's "win_dir.zip" library for a good dir() function on Windows
- Matt's "32bits.zip" library to be able to pass 32-bit parameters to
  routines in a DLL
- a library to have something like 'profile_time' on Windows
- a library with memory routines such as poke2() etc.
- one out of about half a dozen 'record' libraries

... and so on. Every experienced Eu programmer can continue the list
her/himself. Please note that I'm only talking here about very basic
features, that are part of the standard distribution of many or most
other general purpose programming languages nowadays. Using user
contributions for all this is far too much patchwork concerning to my
taste.

Please allow me to quote myself:
| For several years, many Euphoria programmers have written a total of
| more than 1400 user contributions, which can be downloaded from the
| archives at RDS's website. Almost all of them are written by a single
| person. Their quality varies from contributions by highly qualified I.T.
| professionals and university research scientists, to the first
| programming steps of beginners. Sometimes looking in the archieves for a
| certain module is like searching for a needle in a haystack, and after
| having found something, it might be hard to consider especially for
| inexperienced programmers, whether or not that code is reliable.
| 
| Since the system of unrelated individual user contributions is just
| "patchwork", several routines (e.g. for reading a null-terminated string
| from memory) are contained in many contributions, and maybe the user
| also has written such a function himself. This is a common source for
| naming conflicts. This also means re-inventing the wheel several times,
| which is an unnecessary waste of time and efforts.

> Plus we can often use crash_routine for runtime errors, and have it
> write important string values to screen or file. In both cases, it can
> be formatted "pretty" with pretty_print.

BTW, as Jason wrote, not "only" the ex.err dump is cluttered, but also also
the output of trace(). This can't be changed by my 'errconv.zip' library.

Regards,
   Juergen

-- 
Have you read a good program lately?