[m-dev.] debugging grades and I/O tabling

[Mark Brown]

On 28-Aug-2002, Zoltan Somogyi <zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 28-Aug-2002, Mark Brown <dougl at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > Is it not possible to filter the output of the tests to get rid of any
> > variation?
> 
> It is possible, but (a) the details would have to be ugly,

In that case we could add a (developer-only) command to mdb which
turns off all printing of events.  The details of this should be
straightforward.

and (b) unlike
> my proposal, it doesn't address the other problem, the problem of the
> declarative debugger not knowing the context of a call.

We can deal with the two problems separately.

> > Regarding the proposal, it is nice to think of the '--trace shallow' option
> > as saying that the module is trusted to have no bugs in it, and that the only
> > way a problem may arise from the module is if an inadmissible call is made to
> > it.
> 
> No. It could also mean that the trust in the module was misplaced.

What I'm saying is that the '--trace shallow' option is an assertion by the
programmer that "there are no bugs in the module"; that is, it is an
instruction to the declarative debugger that it can (and should) assume there
are no bugs in that module.  The assertion may be wrong, of course,
but that is beside the point; the point is that the assertion is _not_
"there are no bugs in the module, or any module it calls".

Cheers,
Mark.

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