A disorganized collection of TODOs, bug reports, and friends' suggestions

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January/Feb 2010 (notes from initial release)

Maybe don't display boilerplate code when classes are being initialized?

Hubert's suggestions for permalinks:

'''

Hubert: 1) It would be cool to have the ability to link directly to an

execution point, so that when I send you a link, you could see the code

I'd written and the point in execution that I want to discuss.

me: good suggestion. that also requires me to save your code in

something other than a regular POST variable, which i'm not doing right

now. then i could send links of the following form:

http://python.pgrind.com/code_id=20#4 (for line 4 of code snippet 20)

Hubert: yup, yeah the problem lies in storing the code, which brings in

a whole can of worms. but suppose you did, consider a RESTful approach

(which I am drilling into deeply, hence it's on my mind):

http://python.pgrind.com/pg/code/20#4

...quite easy to do and manage in a framework like Django.

'''

Cory McLean: 'Might be nice to be able to automatically jump to particular step

# rather than just inc/decrement and jump to ends, particular if the

number of steps executed is significant.'

Related work:

- PyWhip: http://pywhip.appspot.com/

- also powered by Google App Engine

- Crunchy: http://code.google.com/p/crunchy/

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2010-09-05

From Hacker News feedback:

- support for raw_input() sounds like something reasonable to include,

though, since it could simply pop up a text box and ask the user to

input a string e.g., javascript:alert("hello, " + prompt("what is your

name?"))

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2010-09-29

Chas Leichner (chaoslichen@gmail.com) emailed me to show me his related

project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiS4MZF5eDQ

http://code.google.com/p/idlecarpentry/

He had an interesting idea of annotating lines of code with special

comments, and those comments would display when those lines were being

executed. That way, you can have sorta like 'literate programming

tutorials' that intermix code and comments. I could think about

implementing something similar within my Online Python Tutor.

e.g.,

#> declare a variable

x = 5

#> an if statement tests a condition

if x < 5:

y = x + 5

else:

y = x - 5

the appropriate annotations would display when you stepped through the

line of code immediately below each annotation.

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2011-09-15

- Integrate Peter's Python 3 fork into one unified application, and

perhaps deploy online on WebFaction, since they offer both Python 2.X

and Python 3.X on their servers.

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2011-09-23

- The BACKEND can easily print out a nice list of variables in each

stack frame (and globals) by order of their APPEARANCE in the original

program execution ... that way, the front-end doesn't have to "guess"

an optimal order and can simply use the order that the backend has

pre-computed. e.g., list local stack variables by their order of

definition in the original program execution.

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2011-09-24

Ron's suggestion:

Ron Yeh - Feedback: It'd be nice if (for longer programs) the text

window would auto scroll to the current line. For your "Philip's

10-minute intro to Python" example, I was stepping through your code but

then the current line went off screen. I had to manually scroll down a

few times.

Philip Guo - great idea! do you know if there's any jQuery or other js

tricks to do this sort of scrolling?

Ron Yeh - Pretty sure I've done this before, a while back. Basicaly you

just need a named div or anchor in your document, and then you can

scroll to it. This page might help:

http://css-tricks.com/snippets/jquery/smooth-scrolling/

(also auto-scroll the program's stdout output as well as the code

display ... that one is easy --- always auto-scroll to BOTTOM!)

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2011-09-26

A subset of the suggestions from MIT folks (see more in my private notes

file):

- people thought that it's important to draw arrowheads at the end of

pointers ... try to make them relatively 'clean-looking', though

- what if the user accidentally (or purposefully) creates a HUGE list or

other data structure? how will the visualization handle this? right

now it might croak.

- one idea is to LIMIT the size of the returned JSON data from the

back-end???

- to make it easier to jump to certain points in execution rather than

tediously single-step through execution. e.g., could imagine adding a

scrubber (like for video playback) combined with pointing at line of

code to jump to the NEXT or PREV time that line of code as executed.

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2011-09-29

Upgrade to Python 2.7 after moving over to Webfaction, so that I can use

the default standard library "import json"