[Pipmak-Devel] Build 170: First impression..

[Andrea Viarengo]

Hello Christian!

First of all: Happy 2008!!

I have tried your last build 170: Nice work!!

The new Lua command line and the table inspector are very useful,
There are still a little bug, when you inspect a table contained in another
table, you cannot return to the first table pressing the arrow at top of the
window, and you get the error:

Error running onmouseup handle of handle 3:
error in error handler

this non appear if you inspect a table two level down (i.e: table inside a
table inside to another table), from the more depth table, you can return to
the father table, but next, you cannot return to the root table.

Perhaps, you know this, and you are working to fix.

An interesting hidden features: if you write "_G" in Command Line you get
the list of all Global variable defined....
The list includes also tables pipmak,math,string,.... a mode to view all the
function/method defined
debug.getinfo(func_name) return some information about the function,
including the lua file where is defined...useful!

Some ideas on evolution of table inspector:

1) Click on a line in the table inspector, should write the
variable/function/table name in the command line, for further analisys,
for example, I inspect the table "pipmak", click on line containing
"gotonode", and I get "pipmak.gotonode(" in the command line...
a useful shortcut for lazy people....

2) Resizable columns in the table inspector (long name are truncated)

3) Taking into consideration a tree structure for sub-table inspecting,
and/or possibility to open subtable in another window.

4) What you think about integration of my menu.lua in your gui.lua? (I
added submenus and long menu manager to my last version)

I have not tried to see if the bug about cached patches is disappear (but
I'm sure of that), but
I saw that the bug concerned patch dimensions is remained (using patch
without 3d positioning - see the visual difference in my autocubic project
in 0.2.6 and in build 168), you are working on it?

Just a curiosity: do you think to add an embedded lua editor in pipmak
(maybe with step by step debug), using texteditor functionalities?

Thank you for your work.

Bye

Andrea

[Christian Walther]

Post by Andrea Viarengo
There are still a little bug, when you inspect a table contained in
another table, you cannot return to the first table pressing the arrow
error in error handler

Works for me, unless I'm misunderstanding you. Can you describe the
exact steps you use to reproduce this?

Post by Andrea Viarengo
An interesting hidden features: if you write "_G" in Command Line you
get the list of all Global variable defined....

I wouldn't call this "hidden", it's plainly documented in the Lua
reference manual...

Post by Andrea Viarengo
1) Click on a line in the table inspector, should write the
variable/function/table name in the command line, for further analisys,
for example, I inspect the table "pipmak", click on line containing
"gotonode", and I get "pipmak.gotonode(" in the command line...
a useful shortcut for lazy people....

Good idea. I have briefly though of this, but haven't followed it any
further because it's not that simple - given just a table (like the
pipmak table in the pipmak.gotonode example), you can't derive an
expression that results in it (i.e. "pipmak" in this example). The
command line and table inspector would have to work together to keep
track of how you arrived at the current table.

Post by Andrea Viarengo
2) Resizable columns in the table inspector (long name are truncated)

Or, more fundamentally, resizable panels. The command line panel should
be resizable too.

Post by Andrea Viarengo
3) Taking into consideration a tree structure for sub-table inspecting,

Personally, I like the column view better than the tree view for this
application, so that's basically what I've implemented (just that only
the rightmost column is visible at any time).

Post by Andrea Viarengo
and/or possibility to open subtable in another window.

At the moment that's not possible because nodes are designed as
singletons. We'll see whether it makes sense to revise that decision.

Post by Andrea Viarengo
4) What you think about integration of my menu.lua in your gui.lua? (I
added submenus and long menu manager to my last version)

Well, at the moment there just are no menus in the Pipmak user
interface, so the question is moot. If and when they appear, I'll
consider it, so thanks for the offer.

Post by Andrea Viarengo
Just a curiosity: do you think to add an embedded lua editor in pipmak
(maybe with step by step debug), using texteditor functionalities?

No. First, because implementing a full text editor is a lot of work
(implementing the current text edit fields was enough already, and
they're still not complete), and I don't see a lot of value in it. Even
the debugger is probably best implemented as a separate application that
has access to the platform's full set of user interface components (I
don't know if there's an existing remote debugging solution for Lua
(like Winpdb for Python), but even writing our own would probably be
easier (and more useful) than doing it inside Pipmak with its limited
capabilities). Second, I don't think users would be happy with a text
editor that doesn't follow their platform's conventions. I'm hoping to
get away with that for the few single-line text fields, but even they
probably already have a distinct Mac-like feel to them.

Post by Andrea Viarengo
But what about different rendering of not-trasparent and trasparent PNG
(see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.games.devel.pipmak.devel/76 )?

That's the next thing on my to-do list.

-Christian

[Andrea Viarengo]

Post by Christian Walther
Works for me, unless I'm misunderstanding you. Can you describe the
exact steps you use to reproduce this?

Ok, probably the error appears only in my build, but you can check the
behaviour on your:

start from new untitled.pipmak

press "L",

inspect the table "_G",

inspect the sub-table "coroutine", and after click on the back arrow to
return to _G table, in this case I get the error, and you?

Andrea

[Christian Walther]

Post by Andrea Viarengo
inspect the sub-table "coroutine", and after click on the back arrow to
return to _G table, in this case I get the error, and you?

Nope, no error here.

Maybe try this modification to bypass the extended error handling from r162:

--- source/misc.c (revision 170)
+++ source/misc.c (working copy)
@@ -107,7 +107,7 @@
lua_pushliteral(L, "_TRACEBACK");
lua_rawget(L, LUA_GLOBALSINDEX); /* get traceback function (from
debug library) */
lua_insert(L, base); /* put it under chunk and args */
- status = lua_pcall(L, nargs, nresults, base);
+ status = lua_pcall(L, nargs, nresults, 0);
lua_remove(L, base); /* remove traceback function */
return status;
}

-Christian