Troubleshooting in Max
Some Basics for Getting Started with Max Programming
You will always want to keep the Max Console open as you create patches, so you can get a glimpse into how Max is ‘thinking.’ This is important because sometimes it is not ‘thinking’ in the same way that you are thinking! Max does ‘think’ by the way, in its own way, since it is classified as a Turing-complete language. When you want to double check what’s going on within the patch, hook up print objects to the outputs, and name each print object with a unique identifier so you can see its output in the console. One of your most important need-to-know activities is to make sure an object is outputting exactly what you think it should be outputting, when and how you expect it to be.
In the example above, a bang object is connected to a print object with the name ‘bang,’ so with each bang you will see ‘bang•bang’ in the console. The identifier for the integer object is ‘i’ so each output of the integer objects will be prefixed by ‘i•’ just as float objects will be prefixed ‘float•’ not because they are float objects, but because the identifier of its print object is named ‘float.’ Finally, since a toggle object outputs either 1 or 0, that will be the output in the console associated with print ‘toggle.’
The console will also report major errors that occur in your programming. Here’s an example of what happens when you hook up the output of a PLAYR module to a float object. This is known in computer science as an ‘oopsy’ since float objects cannot accept video signal as an input.
Some error messages are reported outside the browser, at the top of the patcher as a warning, usually when you’ve done something really crazy.
If you produce a stack overflow, which happens when you create infinite loops, you will see this kind of message at the top of the patcher.
A lot of debugging is proceeding step by step through the logic of your program, testing the outputs of each operation at each stage to make sure everything is doing what it’s supposed to.
