Friday, September 22, 2006
The right tool for the job
SmartEiffel includes an embedded debugger. You compile your application with the -sedb option, and run it. You can then step through and inspect it by using a command-line interface.
Damian Dobroczyński wanted to wrap the SmartEiffel debugger in a GUI. Not wanting to hack the SmartEiffel source code, he looked around for the right tools for the job.
The "expect" utility is designed to talk to command-line applications: it feeds them input, and captures and analyses the output. The Tk widgets provide a quick way to knock up a graphical user interface, and the whole lot can be tied together with the TCL scripting language. And so was born the Sedbov project - the SmartEiffel Embedded Debugger Output Visualiser - a human interface to the SmartEiffel debugger.
Damian writes:
Damian Dobroczyński wanted to wrap the SmartEiffel debugger in a GUI. Not wanting to hack the SmartEiffel source code, he looked around for the right tools for the job.
The "expect" utility is designed to talk to command-line applications: it feeds them input, and captures and analyses the output. The Tk widgets provide a quick way to knock up a graphical user interface, and the whole lot can be tied together with the TCL scripting language. And so was born the Sedbov project - the SmartEiffel Embedded Debugger Output Visualiser - a human interface to the SmartEiffel debugger.
Damian writes:
This is one of the weirdest projects I've made in my short life. I tried to make human interface to SmartEiffel embedded debugger and I proved that it is possibleThe fruits of Damian's labour are a 1238-line TCL script, which produces the interface shown below (click for an enlargement):
posted by Roger Browne @ 11:51 
