Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!pequod.cso.uiuc.edu!dorner From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Problem with LSC 4.0 debugger. Message-ID: <1989Sep26.123252.718@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 26 Sep 89 12:32:52 GMT References: <85031@pyramid.pyramid.com> <244@dbase.UUCP> <85347@pyramid.pyramid.com> <254@dbase.UUCP> Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) Distribution: na Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lines: 20 In article <254@dbase.UUCP> awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas) writes: >I guess our only continuing disagreement, then, is where to put a global- >context debugger on the priority list. It seems like a lot of pain for >only a little gain, to me, so I'd put it fairly low on the list. It seems to me that when a program does SOMETHING BAD, the causes (or at least the "triggers") are often well back in the stack. Not being able to view contexts other than the current one is a big problem. As a simple example, suppose your program dies because you passed a bad parameter to a function; inside the function, you can say, "that sure is a ROTTEN parameter", but that's all. Being able to peek up the program's metaphorical skirt may show you WHY you passed such a worthless parameter in the first place. Definitely an essential feature. -- Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu UUCP: {convex,uunet}!uiucuxc!dorner IfUMust: (217) 244-1765