[mercury-users] Debugger

[Fergus Henderson]

On 27-Dec-2002, Noel  Pinto <cool4life at rediffmail.com> wrote:
> In the User Guide, in the environment variable MERCURY_OPTIONS, -D 
> specifies the type of debugger to be used.
> 
> What is the meaning internal and external debugger? What do mean 
> by internal and external here??

The "internal" debugger is also known as "mdb"; it is the one
documented in the Debugging chapter of the Mercury User's Guide.
It is called "internal" because the debugger is actually part of
the same operating system process as the program being debugged.
The "external" debugger is a separate program, called Morphine,
that communicates with the program being debugged via a socket.

> What is the differnce between internal debugger and external 
> debugger?

There are lots of differences.  One of them is that the external
debugger currently requires that you have Eclipse Prolog installed.
Some others are described in the Morphine documentation.
See <http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~jahier/morphine.html>.

> When an external debugger is not available, why is it mentioned 
> here?? Isn't it possible to mention it when it arises??

The Mercury User's Guide can't tell whether or not you have installed
the external debugger.  Anyway, it would be confusing if the contents
of the Mercury User's Guide changed depending on what software you
had installed.

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