Debugging Run BASIC Web Apps

In Run BASIC's first release there is effectively no built-in debugger. Of course you can use print to log to the browser page or to a file, and this is no more or less than many other web scripting systems. We aim to do something about this in the very near future.

One of our users suggested that it would be good to create an inspector panel in Run BASIC itself and that we should add some reflection via an EVAL$() function that would allow arbitrary execution of BASIC code at runtime. We would probably also need to at least metaprogramming features like the ability to get information from the runtime like:

• The name of the current context (ie. function or subroutine)
• The names of all the variables and arrays in scope
• The source code for the current context
• A collection of objects that models the stack
• Probably more stuff

While this sort of thing is possible I think that we probably will initially provide a high level runtime inspection panel that the programmer can show and hide as needed. This is BASIC after all, and it should be as easy as possible to use. The metaprogramming stuff is cool though. ;-)