Jim Ault wrote:

On 8/4/06 12:23 PM, "Josh Mellicker" <josh at dvcreators.net> wrote:
I never liked using the Message box to show values ("put "here¹s
MyVar now: " & MyVar"), for a few reasons, because it was a palette
and covered important stuff up if I made it bigger, because I like to
look at a lot of history sometimes, because it was problematic to
find puts in my code sometimes, etcŠ

This is why I always use
put "The answer at this point is "& MyVar into msg

Then 'into msg' becomes the search string

I believe Chipp Walters has a utility script for finding all the 'put' lines
in scripts.  Check the archive at
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/

I agree with you TextWrangler technique, and I use BBEdit for the same
purpose, but not extensively.

At RevCon West '05 Ken Ray and I did a session on helpful coding conventions, and one of the things we covered was a commenting method I use here that I call "Bang! What? Hmmm...".

The goal is to place comments in the code that make it easy to find things later, like dropping bread crumbs on your journey through the development process, using three types of comment tags:

--! (Bang!)
Used for stuff that I know I want removed before shipping, things like answer and put commands placed in the code for debugging, e.g.:

   --!
   answer tMyVar
   --!


--? (What?)
I use this one to denote sections where what I'm doing may be suitable for shipping, but it's not an optimal solution and warrants review somewhere down the road as time permits, e.g.:

   --? Should I use a case block here instead?
   if tMyVar is "Bob" then
     DoBobsThang
   else if tMyVar = "Steve" then
     DoStevesThang
   end if


--| (Hmmm)
This is for minor things that may warrant review or not, or are worth noting for team management such as code changes I make in a module which I'm not usually in charge of, e.g.:

   --| RG 060804 Changed global use to call a function instead to
   --| allow for more dynamic changes in the environment:
   # global gMyStackName
   # modal gMyStackName
   modal MyStackName()


The upside to such a commenting scheme is that it lets you use a tool like devolution's Script Search (now much improved for the forthcoming v2) to rapidly find all occurrences of these comment strings. For example, before shipping I can just search for "--!" and I know I'll find all the gotchas I need to clean up before I press my Build button.

So for the low cost of three characters and a smidgen of self-discipline, you get an unambiguous way to rapidly find things you want to address throughout your code base.

Conceivably one could write a plugin which responds to the IDE's SavingStandalone message (which should ideally be "revSavingStandalone" since it's not an engine message, but I digress) to automate the search for "--!" and notify the developer if any are found. That's on my to-do list for my own standalone builder, but I have quite a to-do list there and a lot of client deliverables before then so don't hold your breath. :)

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Managing Editor, revJournal
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