# from Ovid
# on Monday 18 August 2008 09:14:
>Moving forward is so much more satisfying than "did not/did too"
> discussions.
Now if only there were somewhere to move forward to. My thought was
that a more sophisticated presentation of complicated have/want could
be accomplished using a pair of scrollable widgets (populated from the
diagnostic block) rather than the producer trying to ascii-art format
the output.
And of course this would be required for e.g. images in the have/want (I
still don't have a convenient way to diagnose the polygon offset code
man!)
But, let's pretend your have/want is just a pair of deeply nested
hashes. Rendering them as multiline indented text and then using (even
just) vimdiff might more immediately show the error.
But, maybe it's a pair of arrays or a matched set of key-value pairs
(one level of hash) -- in this case a table would be good (like a
spreadsheet view), but long values overrun the cells, etc. The grid
widget in most GUI toolkits have a way to handle that by letting the
cell content overflow (being masked at the cell edge or whatever) and
then letting the user adjust the column width if they want.
id name
have 1 Bob
want 2 Bob
And, assuming that a tool was handed serialized data, said tool could
transform between one or more views of that data.
But if the producer only outputs ascii art, well...
Thus, for those who "like" to scrollback in the terminal and compare the
ascii art, perhaps some plugin of the harness should be responsible for
that formatting?
--Eric
--
"...our schools have been scientifically designed to
prevent overeducation from happening."
--William Troy Harris
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