Re: Writing about probeDisplays: what do you think?

[glen e. p. ropella]

At 04:43 PM 5/27/99 -0500, you wrote:
>How could I forget about this when I never heard of it before? Answer me
>that!

Don't know what to say to that!  [grin]  It's in the source code and
in the reference manual.... Sorry, couldn't help myself.

>Are the things in parentheses the names of instance variables in the
>object where this command is run?

Yes.

>If so, OK for me, except I don't understand
>
>1) the ,":" on line 4.
>
>    My guess is it is a separator between var probes and message probes.
>Good?

Yes.

>2), NULL in last item.
>
>  
>     If my other guess is correct, I wonder why this is not "nil"
>instead of "null"???

Because "nil" is a null pointer.  NULL is a non-value.... (zero).
You terminate with a NULL string.  Of course, since they
really are 'const char *'s one could easily use nil and be 
justified.  So, the easy answer is because that's just not the
way it is.

>   Using the custom probemap, what would this be?????? As you see, I
>only can guess at the obvious part:
>
>
>   probeMap = [CustomProbeMap create: aZone forClass: [self class]
>                              withIdentifiers: "numbugs",
>                              "diffuseConstant", "worldXSize",
>                              "worldYSize","minIdealTemp",
>                               "maxIdealTemp","minOutputHeat",
>                             "maxOutputHeat", "evaporationRate", 
"toggleRandomizedOrder" 
>                             "randomMoveProbability",":",
>                              "addHeatbug:", NULL];
>

Right.

>But there's no way to add setHideResult: 1 here, so one price of the
>Custom Probe Map is lack of detail?

Right again.  The two limitations to the shortcut are that you 
can't design cross-class probeMaps and you can't set hideResult.
It assumes you want to see the results.  A defaultHideResult
would be a nice feature.  Or a message one could send to the
probeLibrary (or somewhere) telling it how to set the hideResults.

Anyway, I assume that, since it's not in any of the apps and few
people know about it, that it's not a useful feature.  Since we've
started using regular macros to condense code, maybe this should
be a macro instead of a convenience method.  But, it sure does
shrink the probeMap creation code.

glen

--
glen e. p. ropella                =><=          Hail Eris!
Home: http://www.trail.com/~gepr/home.html  (505) 424-0448
Work: http://www.swarm.com                  (505) 995-0818  

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