Need a preprocessor identifier when $DEBUG is used

[qb64-phoenix-edition]

Need a preprocessor identifier when $DEBUG is used

[SteveMcNeill]

Is this really a necessary change to make? The vast majority of the user's code would have to be inside $IF blocks, as above, and all they'd need to do is add a single truth statement to the start of the program to toggle when they wanted to see the debug information or not. IE:

$LET DEBUG = FALSE

'do all sorts of stuff

$IF DEBUG THEN
Print "We are debugging"
$End If

Change that $LET from FALSE to TRUE, and the user can manually turn on that debug segment, without necessarily having to rely on the built in vWatch debugging system.

QB64 source is quite complex and longish already. I'm not certain we'd see much actual benefit to digging into and sorting an extension out for this, when it's already so easily available for an end user. ;)

[a740g]

Yes true. But QB64 IDE automatically wants to add $DEBUG at the top when the line column is clicked. It would be nice if we could detect this using the preprocessor rather than manually editing.

[mkilgore]

Personally I'm somewhere in-between - the suggestion seems reasonable to me, but Steve's not wrong that you can get basically the same functionality by just defining DEBUG yourself. That said I don't actually know all that much about how $DEBUG works, I think I should look into it a bit more.

Seeing your snippet of code, what would also be nice is if you could wrap the whole thing into some kind of DebugPrint statement, rather than have the $ifs everywhere. You could almost get there with just a SUB, but it's not quite the same :-/ Any kind of change like that would require a fair amount more thought though :D

I would personally encourage you to give this change a shot if you feel like it. Looking at the qb64.bas code I don't think this is a hugely significant change to make, but even if we did decide to do it it's probably not something we would get to soon. I would not be opposed to adding this if we had a working version and it wasn't too complicated to add. The only thing I would suggest is make the define _DEBUG or something so it's less likely to clash with what people might already have.

I'm with Matt on this. I'm somewhere in-between. It sounds nice but can easily be replicated with your own $LET.