The debugger integration is not for understanding other people's code,
but for debugging your new work.
I think of Dissect as the sentence debugger, and Debug as the
explicit-definition-and-higher debugger. The idea is, you write
something. Then, full of hope, you run it. Of course it crashes. So
you just ctrl-K, run it again: it stops on the error, automatically
dissects it, and you see what went wrong.
Both tools, Dissect and Debug, have some rough edges right now, but I
think when they're smoothed out this could be a very congenial environment.
For dissecting the last line of Term: look toward the bottom of
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/Dissect
It tells you how to set up a User Key to dissect the current line (I
hope this works on the Mac).
Beyond that, if Dissect really works out it could be fitted tighter into
the IDE.
Henry Rich
On 3/6/2015 5:58 PM, Ian Clark wrote:
Henry, you must be congratulated on a slick, 24-carat tool.
Having seen earlier versions of dissect, I applaud the emergence of
"dissect" labs. There's scope to fine-tune them, but they already
deliver.
I'm a believer in labs. You only ever run them once, and then you
forget how helpful they've been. But before I ran the labs I felt
little confidence in my grasp of dissect. (This is a heavyweight tool,
and not to be grokked by simply playing with it – there's a lot you
won't find.) After I ran the labs I felt dissect was an old friend.
I can foresee the time when the JQt IDE is seen as a Trinity of
windows: Term, Edit and Dissect. The sooner this is made into a
serious proposition the better. At present…
++ You get a Term window by launching JQt
++ You get an Edit window by ⌘N
++ You get a Dissect window… how?…
load 'debug/dissect'
dissect '+/ z + i. 3 3' [ z =. 100 200 300 NB. okay I get the message.
Now I read a lot of other people's code. To analyse it I never use
Debug. Though I've been known to use 13!:0 if I'm totally stuck. So
Debug-integration is pointless to me.
WIBNI (wouldn't-it-be-nice-if) ⌘T – or whatever (…⌘D is taken) – gave
me a dissect window, dissecting the last line of Term, or the phrase
I'd selected in Term or Edit.
Yes, I've inserted (load 'debug/dissect') into my startup.ijs, but
there's more needed for proper IDE integration.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 1:13 AM, Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote:
Version 3.7 of the Dissect addon is released, for j6.02 and J8.03+.
Dissect aims to be the easiest-to-use and most complete tool for learning J
and debugging J sentences, and I think this version is a big step in that
direction. Check it out if you haven't yet.
This release has:
* Tutorial labs to help you learn dissect (thanks to David Steele for
writing these). If you're not a J guru, you might learn some J too.
* Built-in help, with tooltips for all the display components, so you can
hover over blocks and see what they mean.
* Integration into the J8 debugger so that you can press a button to dissect
the sentence the debugger has stopped on. There's also an Autodissect Mode
so that as you step through a verb, every sentence is dissected
automatically before it is executed.
IMPORTANT: When you get the new debug/dissect from Package Manager, make
sure you also get the latest versions of labs/labs, ide/qt, and the Base
Library.
The Labs will run on J6.02, they're just not released for that platform, so
if you're still on 6.02 you can download them on J8.03 and copy to your Labs
directory.
Henry Rich
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