V. 20:3 (38-42): If At First You Don’t Succeed by John Clayburg

If At First You Don’t Succeed by John Clayburg

Systems you create don’t always work quite right at first. And when you revise them, your “improvements” don’t necessarily help. It’s what you ordered … but not what you wanted. What to do? For those who use EasyLanguage, here’s the solution.

Sooner or later, those who write computer program code, whether for personal strategies or for programming for others, must face the task of correcting errors or making changes in their work. The process of finding and correcting program errors, often referred to as debugging, can be as challenging and frustrating as writing the program code itself. To effectively and efficiently make changes in program code, often you must determine values for specific variables on selected bars on a chart. Many software platforms provide multiple utilities within their frameworks specifically for this purpose.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll concentrate on the processes that can be used to debug programs written on the EasyLanguage system and indicator development platform. The routines presented here are equally applicable to TradeStation 4.0, ProSuite 2000i, and the current online version, TradeStation 6.0.