| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PROGRAMMATION ★ KWIKREF/X ★ |
KWIKREF/X (Amstrad Action) | KWIKREF/X (Amstrad Computer User) |
No matter how hard you try, bugs in your BASIC programs are inevitable. Can Parimgold's new programmer's utility help undo those tangled knots? There's nothing quite as frustrating as having a bug in program. Something is going wrong somewhere, but where exactly remains a mystery. The problem is that no matter how well structured the program is when you start, it invariably ends up looking like a plate of spaghetti. Finding where the error lies can be a bit of a nightmare. Wouldn't it be wonderful to an way of seeing what happens where, without having to painstakingly search through every single line in the program? That's exactly what Kwickref/x sets out to do. It will search through your BASIC programs in an instant, examining the lines for you, and producing a reference table of the results. This results table is comprised of two sections. The first is an alphabetical list of variables along with the line numbers in which they appear. Further to this lines where a variable may be changed are marked with an asterisk, to indicate that it's a place where things are especially likely to go wrong. Next a list of all the lines which access other lines is shown, ie all the GOTOs and GOSUBs. This shows up lines which may be jumping to the wrong place, or for the wrong reason. Kwikref/x is easier to use than it is to say. When loaded you're prompted for a filename. Bung the disk with the troublesome program into the drive, tap in the filename and off it goes. It counts through the program lines at a fair old whack, a 6K program takes around 25 seconds to process. When finished you're asked whether you'd like to see the table on-screen, have a hard copy printed out, or to save the table onto disk. Hard copy is probably the most useful. You can have it by your side as you re-examine the listing, but of course not everybody has a printer. The disk output version is a standard ASCII file, and can be loaded into a word processor for future reference. Just how useful is all this though? While there's no doubt that it is capable of helping trace certain errors, it by no means is guaranteed to crack all bugs. The £13 price tag may prove to be prohibitive for a program which appears to do so little. Though undoubtedly useful in certain instances, it's unlikely to be the sort of thing you'd buy until you actually came across a seemingly unsolvable problem. VERDICT GOOD NEWS
BAD NEWS
Adam Waring, AA |
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