Text Prompt System - programming takes lots of tri

Chris Bailey

I use Fluent's Text User Interface and Text Prompt System extensively. It seems like awfully slow going. Each line of code requires experimenting with the system to see what answers it will ask, and the answers are context-sensitive enough that a change in one place will require hard-to-anticipate changes elsewhere. The error messages are often inscrutable, like "unbounded variable". Not only is writing the program hard in the first place (and it's impossible to do without experiments), but debugging is doubly so - especially with commands nested inside of multiple levels of Scheme loops. For example, in the following, it took me a couple of hours to detect that I needed the last "y", and I have little idea why this seemed to stop working relative to the previous project, except that maybe it has to do with hanging nodes.

[many previous lines]

(ti-menu-load-string "/adapt/combine-registers 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ()")

(ti-menu-load-string "/adapt/adapt-to-register 8 0 0 y")

Do you have the same slow and frustrating experience? What's your way of improving it?