ANN: LiveCodeErrors for iPhone

[Bernard Devlin]

Whilst I don't have a use for this incarnation of Mark's app (I'm
avoiding the new Apple ecosystem as much as possible), I've used his
web service for looking up such errors, and I bought a copy of his
library errorLib years ago for the same purpose.

It's kind of weird that some of us should get such errors on an almost
daily basis, yet others never get them.  Just goes to show, different
folks have different programming practices.  I would think that after
a decade of using Livecode I too count as a "pro", and I am very
grateful for the existence of Mark's work in this area.

Such bizarre error codes do manifest themselves, and they do not just
happen through the contrived example that Mark provided -- and even
then, without being able to lookup the meaning of the error codes, one
would not necessarily know that a non-existent handler is where the
error lies in the specific example that Mark gives (it could be that
the executeNoneExistingHandler had a misspelling).

Yesterday I had a problem occur in a far more prosaic scenario.  A
loop's end condition was controlled by the value in a field.  The
field was only 1 line high, and inadvertently two numbers were entered
in the field, thus the code was failing as the loop end condition
failed (it was no longer a number but two lines of numbers).  Because
this occured within a try/catch, I received only the obscure error
numbers.  (This was not in a production app, just something I was
working on within the IDE, hence no real attempt at type-checking the
data.)

There was nothing immediately obvious to me that was wrong with the
loop, and I hadn't noticed the tiny little magnifiying glass in the
IDE variables pane that should have indicated to me that there was
more to the variable containing the loop end condition than a mere
integer (a quick glance at the variables pane showed that the loop end
condition was a number).  A quick shot to Mark's online service, and I
got the meaning of the error code and could immediately see where the
problem was.

I am certain Mark is providing his library, his web service, and now
his iPhone app in good faith.  Like you, Mark has invested a huge
portion of his professional career in Hypertext/Livecode.  You are
both people who set about trying to spread the love of Livecode, and
I'm exceedingly grateful to both of you.

Bernard

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:21 AM, Richard Gaskin
<ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
>> on foo
>>  try
>>    executeNonExistingHandler
>>  catch myErr
>>    put myErr
>>  end try
>> end foo
>
> I doubt many pros would need a lookup to figure out that a non-existent
> handler would result in a "can't find handler" error. ;)
>
> But seriously, most devs using try/catch setups won't be executing random
> code, they'll be working on things that are somewhat well defined, and use
> their own error messages to report to the user.  I don't know of any dev who
> report RunRev's messages to their users; they just don't provide enough
> guidance for the user.