REALBasic: TDG, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8.  Debugging and Building

This chapter covers topics connected with the final stages of transforming your project into an application: how to do it, figuring out why you can’t, figuring out why you can but your application doesn’t work anyway, and other considerations leading up to that culminating moment when you declare your application finished.

Compile Errors

Just before you run your project in the IDE or build it into an application, REALbasic pauses to look for errors in your project’s code. REALbasic at this moment is compiling your code (transforming it into a language that your computer can understand), and so such errors are termed compile errors.

If REALbasic discovers a compile error, compiling comes to a halt; you cannot run or build the project. Instead, REALbasic opens the Code Editor where the error was found, selects the line containing the error, and shows beneath that line a popup window describing the error (see Figure 8-1).

Figure 8-1. A compile error

You can dismiss the popup window by clicking anywhere, and at that point you have to try to figure out, from REALbasic’s description, what’s wrong with your code. This is not always easy, because REALbasic is thinking like a machine, so its description of the problem may not be of much help to a human being. Even if you understand what the error message says, you still must figure out what the problem really ...