[m-dev.] Graphical debugger for Mercury

[Fergus Henderson]

On 15-Mar-1999, Warwick Harvey <wharvey at cs.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> We have an honours student here (Greg Denehy, gdenehy at cs.monash.edu.au) who 
> (we plan) will be working on a graphical debugger for Mercury.

I'm glad to hear it!

> He's had some experience with mdb (for a summer project he wrote a program 
> which parsed the trace output of mdb and displayed it in a simple GUI), but 
> I'm looking for more things to point him at to get him up to speed.  So far 
> I've pointed him at the recent interactive query support stuff (what's 
> already in, and what he can find in the recent archives of this list), and 
> the term browser stuff.

Well, that's most of what there is.

Something else that is of some relevance is our recent paper on RTTI in
Mercury (it's in papers/rtti in our CVS repository).

I suppose there may also be some relevant documentation on Opium.
Perhaps Erwan would care to comment?

If you're looking for more general stuff, there is a book about implementing
debuggers that was published sometime in the last few years which is quite
good -- unfortunately I forget the author and exact title :-(

> One thing that came up at the meeting today was the external debugger 
> interface.  What's the status of this?  Is it stable enough for him to 
> consider using it for his debugger (rather than interacting with mdb)?

Yes, I think it is.  It's not completely stable, but any changes
should be pretty minor, e.g. adding new fields to some of the
existing request/response types, or adding new request & response
types (the latter shouldn't cause any problems, since his debugger
just won't issue those request types and so it won't get the
corresponding response types).  It wouldn't be too hard for us
to make any changes that we do make in a backwards compatible
way if necessary.

> Is there anything else he or I should be aware of?

Not that I know of.  If there are any further developments, they will
be reported on this list.

> E.g. was any progress 
> made on user-controlled printing of terms?

Nope.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.