A somewhat interesting thread, is there any argument against the use of a GURU interpreter?
Since there is more as one on aminet and i remember that it was floating around on a floppy 30 years ago, i never was very interested in it since i was aware of what A10001986 told us "it is mostly of interest for programmers" if at all and yes it will show a lot which happened but often not the cause of it, thus i never cared for the guru meditation to much, only that if this happens very often that i must have made some error, where to find this error i will know best because i wrote the turd or tried out a different library/handler and often such is the case it's just that problems often appear only after a long time of use (means then they get obvious to you only after a long time of use) or in certain extreme situations.
I.e. right now i had the problem that the batchrequester i use in OS1.3 crashes after a couple times of use, sometimes it worked fine for 100 tries sometimes it failed very soon and sometimes it even leaded to a guru.
The case was a wrong ASL.library version, this problem never appeared for no other program and only got obvious after a while and i thought "damned why does it repeatingly crash my OS?", first i expected an error in my use of this program but since i know that i exchanged this librarary not to long ago this wil be most probably the cause and it was.
Just to tell the guru and even its interpretation most probably wouldn't have helped me, but what helped me is to remember what i changed to the system.
Because a wrong library is often the cause of troubles (and they often get handed out with a software for which you need exactly this library version - or maybe even not
) i stored any library i use or tried out in an .archive directory (note the dot, this lets such a dir appear always on top of all others, also i use the dot to rename programs though i can use the programs name for the script to run this program, one of the advantages of the Amiga OS is that it accepts a lot of special characters for naming files or directories), and added to the name the version number to differ them, if anything fails as something of my first actions i will revert the one i assume causes the error to it's original state, it's no big deal to copy them back neither to use what you used before.
A machine on which you do a lot of experiments needs such a mentioned "rebuild using standard OS content" often, even if that is only to check if a specific error you can't get a grip on stays, both the heavy experimenting and to rebuild i do since i owned my A2000.
The good thing with the Amiga OS's is that you easy can make a backup of your setup, erase all, rebuild the machine, check the turd and finally copy the backup step by step back without to lose a bit of integrity.
A funny issue with Batchrequester and the wrong asl.library was that it when i tried to use the requester outside of a script in the CLI it returned often "BATCHREQ not found" (i renamed Batchrequester to BatchReq) thus i first had the stupid impression the renaming could be the cause, of course "dammit Gernot that can't be it won't matter how you name it" - in most of the cases, that is i didn't stumbled over such for the Amiga but i know that it is stated for a few DOS programs that they shouldn't be renamed since the program checks its naming, but well who needs to shorten a 8 characters short most probably abreviated name?.
The cause of all this even this weird "not found" was the wrong asl.library version.
This issue didn't got obvious when i used it in a script since i redirected the output to NIL, the only thing it showed then was that it didn't pops up the requester and that sometimes the requester stucks or in the worst case leaded to a guru or an immediate reset without a guru message.
And now i have blisters on my fingers from 1000 and n times starting the filerequester and pressing cancel to be sure it won't crash the system anymore.
(not really)