I agree as well. Simply saying "you screwed up just about here" would
be a great help. I've used interpreted scripting languages that gave
error messages like:
display in puce "This is not an official colour"
^ I don't understand what you meant here.
and they are certainly more helpful as to where the error occurred.
Having a dump of the local environment at the time of the error would
be helpful as well. A -mac dir- will often give clues to what has
gone wrong.
Incidentally, I'll share a little programming trick I use.
As part of my syntax when developing a program I'll have a debug
option and then a couple of statements like:
local star *
if "`debug'" == "debug" { local star }
then in the program I'll have:
`star' mac dir
or
`star' set trace on
to track macros and code through problematic section. The `star'
macro comments out the debugging statements unless debug is on.
Without the debug option everything runs normally, with debug on, you
can get a lot of feedback at chosen spots.
--
David Elliott
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