SCL Call Stack

If you saw my last post on compiling SCL files from SCL, you may have seen that there are some array utility routines I've written that allow you to insert and remove array elements through a simple call providing the array and the number of elements in it.

After creating these routines, I thought they'd be perfect for implementing a call stack in SCL.  Having a call stack available in SCL would mean we can more easily track down the source of bugs in our scl subroutines, especially if they're more generic utilities that may be called from any number of different routines.

So the way I'll be using this is in a very large (8,000+ line) SCL utility where many routines are simply wrappers around BCL commands that make it so I don't have to write out BCL statements again and again.  Basically any time a subroutine starts or ends I just write the stack out to a text file; and if the macro crashes, I just check the latest stack text file and see what subroutines were in the stack, so I can track the problem down.

call_stack.scl

I'd suggest you save the call_stack.scl file into QUESTlib/UserDef/Logics so it's always compiled and ready to go when you need it...

Basically there are three procedures in the call_stack.scl file you need to worry about: start_procedure, end_procedure, and print_stack.  Just call start_procedure and end_procedure with the name of your subroutine as an argument, and the stack will reflect all subroutines you've got running.

However, like I said earlier, I have 8000 lines of SCL code with over 300 subroutines.  So how am I supposed to put in a call to start_procedure and end_procedure for all those subroutines?

The answer is using SCL, what else?  So I went and wrote an SCL macro that lets me select an SCL file, and it then goes through and identifies each subroutine in the file, and adds a call to start_procedure at the beginning and end_procedure at the end of each subroutine, with the name of the sub as the argument.  The file gets saved out as the original filename with "_cs" appended on, so you can go and copy it over if you want, or just run that for debugging purposes.

add_call_stack_to_scl_file.scl