On Aug 26, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:

> Got it.  Thanks for all the inputs and for the great suggestion!


A couple of comments:

1) I could very well be mis-stating his position, but I think that Guillaume 
felt quite strongly that the reductions should occur in the definitions window. 
 Guillaume?

2) you describe showing steps only for "non-definitions"; that seems like a 
needless restriction.  Most definitions won't have steps, but those that do 
should probably be step-able. This will require at least some change to Robby's 
"click on a result" suggestion, since definitions don't currently produce 
output text. Perhaps this is why you (Robby?) suggested excluding these.

3) It's not clear how you want to handle test cases; they don't currently 
generate anything in the interactions window, and yet this sounds like the 
thing that you're *most* likely to want to be able to step.  For the sake of 
argument, let me propose something:

the result of "generate-report" (the hidden summary-generation call that 
check-expect inserts) should be a snip that shows up in the interactions 
window, called (e.g.) "Test Report".  Clicking on this (right-clicking on 
this?) should open a window showing the test cases in some tabular format, 
indicating which ones succeeded and which ones failed.  Selecting one of these, 
the user could choose to see its steps. 

Additional hidden benefit of this structure: because of the syntactic 
fol-de-rol that surrounds test cases, it should be fairly easy in such a 
tabular window to also show those test cases that didn't get run at all, 
because an earlier one caused a runtime error.

Finally, we probably want to think a bit about what happens on a runaway 
computation.  The current stepper handles this reasonably; it would be nice if 
the user could step through these computations to see what went wrong.  Most of 
my initial thoughts on how to handle this require unpleasantly significant 
changes to the way that the interactions window works.


John

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