Script Analysis

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Scott Raney <raney at metacard.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Nov 2002 Jan Schenkel
> <janschenkel at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > How would you do a 'cold' check of the following
> > script-snippet and tell what is going to happen?
> > on myObfuscatedHandler pParam1, pParam2, pParam3
> 
> This is known as "The Halting Problem" in Computer
> Science jargon.
> You'll be disappointed to learn that there *is* no
> general solution to
> it ;-)
>   Regards,
>     Scott
> 

Hi Scott

Heh, I'm way past that disappointment -- ever since
someone explained that Halting Problem to me ;-)
So it came as no shock to me ; I was merely trying to
provide an example that would be understandably
impossible to 'auto-document' in the context of the
xTalk programming language.

But I must say that this particular brain-teaser to
determine what's going to happen, is part of the charm
of xCard environments, and the flexibility offered by
the "do" construct is enormous.
As with any powerful piece of technology, one has to
keep an eye on what one's doing. Mistakes happen, and
they're not always easy to find out. And the computer
simply can't tell us -- and that's what that manual
documentation is for when we need to take another look
a year and a half down the road ;-).

And then good debuggers come in extra handy.
Which reminds me: I _love_ the new variable watcher,
with its ability to set stop points on the basis of
expressions ; I was hoping for that one :-)
And it looks like that other wish, tracking which
piece of code hasn't executed yet, is well on its way
to realisation with the script profiler.

MetaCard and RunRev just keep getting better and
better ; thanks Scott, Kevin and all the others !

Jan Schenkel.

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)

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