Wishlist - better debugging and program testing capabilities

[PMaier]

Well,

This is really a bit of an expansion of post http://forums.eviews.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5129. As noted, the Eviews code editor is pretty basic, but at the top of my personal wishlist are improvements to developing and testing Eviews code more generally.

To be more specific, as I'm developing models in both Matlab and EViews, I can't help but notice that EViews program execution and debugging capabilities are severely limited. I am missing, for instance, to run parts of code selectively (something like "run highlighted"), the ability to set breakpoints, and to execute code stepwise. Also, a particularly annoying feature is that when a error occurs, the pop-up window with the error message is not automatically stored somewhere, and you can't check your code unless you first click ok - after which the error message disappears and cannot be found again.

I realize that I could set the number of errors before the code stops very high and go back to the error messages later, but all too often I think it would be nice when an error occurs if I could simply go back to the code, fix what's wrong, and continue with the program....

Hope this helps,

Philipp

PS When you execute a loop, is there a straightforward way to see where you are in that loop (e.g. print the value of the loop index)? I'm in "Quiet mode", and when you're running 1000s of simulations, it would be nice to get a sense how much longer.... :-)

[EViews Gareth]

You could use some of the logging functions (logmsg) to track loop progress and error messages.