Today I found this note on an old hard-drive in a file simply named “THOUGHTS”.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\r\n======================== COMPUTER IDEAS======================================\r\n\r\n** See ideas.shtml **\r\n\r\n1995 GRAPHICAL DEBUGGING TOOL------------------------------------------------------\r\n\r\ndISPLAYING values of variables and structures in the way one sees them in your\r\nhead. Thats what people want to see. May as well make the representation\r\nconfigurable.\r\n\r\n?? What to look like.\r\n\r\nfoo-+--footoo 24 (int)\r\n    |\r\n    +--bar 5 (long)\r\n          +-----------+----------+----+----------+\r\n\"Earth\"         |  Type |  Value   |Size|Address   |\r\nplanet          +-----------+--------------------------+\r\n      +-radius        | ulong |   1435   |  4 |4C68,3544 |\r\n      +-orbit_radius  | ulong |  4245645 |  4 |4C68,3548 |\r\n      +-eccentricity  | float |  0.104   |  4 |4C68,354D |\r\n      +-periods       |     |    |    |    |\r\n      |        |-axial      | ulong |  24      |  4 |4C68,3552 |\r\n      |        |-solar      | ulong |  80000   |  4 |4C68,3556 |\r\n      |        |-p_lunar    | pointer | 4C68,3643|  4 |4C68,355A |\r\n      +-p_atmosphere_list   |   | 4C68,3775|  8 |4C68,355F |\r\n          +-----------+-----------+---+----------+\r\n\r\n2004 Update\r\nWell of course this was before it's time and did get done and integrated into all\r\ngood compilers, and interpreters. Even Flash has one now.<\/pre>\n
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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,15],"tags":[8,35,36],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dusted-off","category-ideas","tag-dusty","tag-idea","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scipilot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}