[m-dev.] proposed command set for the internal trace based debugger

Peter Schachte pets at students.cs.mu.OZ.AU
Wed Jun 3 17:12:04 AEST 1998


On Wed, 3 Jun 1998, Fergus Henderson wrote:

> On 03-Jun-1998, Peter Schachte <pets at students.cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:
> > I don't really see an advantage of the logging scheme over the mostly
> > destructive scheme.
> 
> The logging scheme can be easily automated, whereas with the mdi
> scheme, the user needs to write mdi versions of every di-moded
> `pragma c_code'.

Ok, fair enough.

> > As for screen IO, that can't really be undone,but I actually think that's
> > an advantage.  When you're debugging some code that prints out the wrong
> > thing, the easy way to do it is to skip over something, and see if the wrong
> > thing comes out on your screen.
> 
> This only works for simple stream-based text screen I/O.
> For more general (e.g. curses-based) text screen I/O the screen display
> will be entirely garbled.  Log-based I/O could 

You can use the mdi approach for curses- or window-based I/O.

With log-based I/O the screen won't be garbled, but after the first time 
you execute the code, it won't do anything either, so it'll be a lot harder
to find bugs in interactive code.


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