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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>
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Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
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Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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