On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Bob Arning wrote:

> For those who wanted to see a SyntaxMorph in the debugger, here it is:
>
> http://www.charm.net/~arning/DebugMorph.21Aug1030am.cs
>
> These changes add a menu item to the debugger context stack menu that
> will toggle the code pane between a standard code pane and a
> SyntaxMorph.

Nice.  However, things could really start to get exciting if you tailored
the SyntaxMorph pop-up menus to the debugging context.

Clicking on any instance/temporary variable could show its current value
in the pop-up!  (Then you wouldn't need the bottom panes on the debugger
as much.)  Clicking on any MessageNode could show its returned object
printString, if the code had executed that far.  (Maybe you could cache
these returned objects.)  Clicking on "self" would show the receiver's
current value, etc.  This context info could be at or near the top of the
pop-up, while the more static information would follow.

> (from a different thread...)
>
> One thought I had along those lines was to replace or supplement
> expressions with their result as they were evaluated. That way you could
> see the code in action as you stepped through it:

Sounds good.  (You wouldn't want to rely on pop-ups for everything.)  I
would tend to go with "supplementing" rather than "replacing", otherwise
you'd lose track of the original source code.  You could have the result
appear inside the appropriate box, beneath the source code, in a brighter
color or something.  I guess this would involve a fair amount of
redrawing... another alternative would be to bring up the result in some
sort of floating pop-up/balloon.

- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net


> Since this modifies the debugger, I would be very cautious
> about saving an image with this installed.
> Requirements:
> 1. SyntaxMorph changeset.
> 2. Release 2.5 through changeset 1383.
> 3. Runs in MORPHIC only.
> 4. 16-bit color highly recommended
>
> Cheers,
> Bob