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>\nSadly 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