Live tape preview is done!

While writing or editing code or by literally just moving your cursor, you now get a live preview of the programs “tape” (basically it’s entire data it works with).

There is one big problem with the current system however. If you’re interested, feel free to read the following.

The big Issue

Loops. You see, in brainf*ck, loops work by using [ to jump to the matching ] if the current cell is zero and by using ] to jump to the matching [ if the cell is non-zero.
This behaviour is actually not that pleasant to simulate when you’re only executing to a specific point in the program, because the “simulator” (the thing that interprets the bit of brainf*ck code up until your cursor and then generates a tape from that) can’t see the matching closing ] as it comes after the cursor. This means the loop will never really execute. But, when you navigate past the entire loop block, the cells jump to a completely different state (as seen in the video at around 0:08).

How am I going to solve it then?

I’ve decided that I dont want to “solve” it by somehow making loops work in live preview. I’ve decided live preview should only be relatively basic. For serious loop-involved debugging, I wanna introduce a special “Debug Mode”. In this mode, you’ll be able to step through your code, have chars printed into the output panel live AND also have the cursor/program pointer correctly jump around.