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by James Robertson.
Original Post: pining for a useful debugger
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The presence of state makes debugging a pain. This arguest for a more functional approach to programing wherever possible
Something like a timewarp or replay debugger that captured the state of the program at every state transition could help with these problems. In languages that reify activation records (as closures or continuations), this should not be that difficult to do, albeit hugely expensive in memory.
hmm. We have this in languages like Lisp and Smalltalk (as alluded to above). Maybe the Kim needs better tools. And yes Ted, the VisualWorks debugger has an awful lot of this with conditional breakpoints and watchpoints. There's still some UI rationalization to be done with the VW debugger (getting the menus and shortcuts aligned with the rest of the tools) - but it's a great tool.
One of the niftier things is the fact that it's a browser, not just a debugger. If you are doing experimental development and hit a method you have not yet implemented, the debugger can generate it for you - and then drop you in it so that the code can be written. Very nice way to develop.
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