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- Newsgroups: comp.arch
- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!ira.uka.de!smurf.sub.org!flatlin!bad
- From: bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org (Christoph Badura)
- Subject: Re: Why would you like a debugger (Was: What would you like in a debugger?
- Organization: Guru Systems/Funware Department
- Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1992 00:25:24 GMT
- Message-ID: <Bt1vuE.I1n@flatlin.ka.sub.org>
- References: <1992Aug7.151937.14321@linus.mitre.org> <341@moene.indiv.nluug.nl> <19920809.175600.935@almaden.ibm.com> <1241@esl.ESL.COM>
- Lines: 31
-
- In <1241@esl.ESL.COM> davida@barney.esl.com (David Alexander) writes:
- > Then we had our weekly meeting, and as we're talking, Prof. Knuth
- >is flipping through my WEB source which he had never been shown before, and
- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
- That may very well be the explanation.
-
- >about 40 pages into the listing, in the middle of our discussion, he says,
- >"By the way, here's your NIL pointer error..." Of course he was correct.
-
- One of the problems in debugging your own programs is that you *know*
- what the program text looks like. I once spent three days chasing the
- following bug:
-
- for i := left to right do;
- something_or_other;
-
- For three days I didn't see the semicolon after the do, I knew there
- wasn't one.
-
- The previous two times I used a debugger, I was tracking down compiler
- errors.
-
- Since the I haven't found debuggers to be very useful. Many were
- inadequate for the problem (conditional breakpoints are a *must*),
- they don't give you a clue as to where you are in the source (adb).
- Some were to buggy to be useful (sdb comes to mind). I am pleased with
- gdb, though.
- --
- Christoph Badura --- bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org
-
- ISO? Nicht immer, aber immer M-vfter.
-