Today I found this note on an old hard-drive in a file simply named “THOUGHTS”.
In 1995 I was tired of the manual debug process in writing (Borland) C programs and imagined a graphical debugger which allowed you to visualise tree-structures of data, but never implemented it. Of course every IDE, browser and toaster has one now.
======================== COMPUTER IDEAS======================================
** See ideas.shtml **
1995 GRAPHICAL DEBUGGING TOOL------------------------------------------------------
dISPLAYING values of variables and structures in the way one sees them in your
head. Thats what people want to see. May as well make the representation
configurable.
?? What to look like.
foo-+--footoo 24 (int)
|
+--bar 5 (long)
+-----------+----------+----+----------+
"Earth" | Type | Value |Size|Address |
planet +-----------+--------------------------+
+-radius | ulong | 1435 | 4 |4C68,3544 |
+-orbit_radius | ulong | 4245645 | 4 |4C68,3548 |
+-eccentricity | float | 0.104 | 4 |4C68,354D |
+-periods | | | | |
| |-axial | ulong | 24 | 4 |4C68,3552 |
| |-solar | ulong | 80000 | 4 |4C68,3556 |
| |-p_lunar | pointer | 4C68,3643| 4 |4C68,355A |
+-p_atmosphere_list | | 4C68,3775| 8 |4C68,355F |
+-----------+-----------+---+----------+
2004 Update
Well of course this was before it's time and did get done and integrated into all
good compilers, and interpreters. Even Flash has one now.
Sadly ideas.shtml has been lost. I vaguely remember it and am now sad its gone – it had dozens of really “good” ideas, games, inventions, stupid stuff written up in some detail. When will I learn to back stuff up!
