NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/programm/2424

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-21 | 1.5 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Bennett E. Todd)
Newsgroups: comp.programming,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.c,comp.arch
Subject: Re: What would you like in a debugger?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 21 Aug 92 00:25:52 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
Followup-To: comp.programming
Organization: Salomon Brothers, Inc
Lines: 19

I'd like to see a debugger with fewer bugs than my code:-(. The only
debugger I've never ever been able to bomb off was adb. And before sneering
too violently at adb, you really oughta experience running adb from a jove
shell window, using the macros under /usr/lib/adb, to root through the data
structures of your currently-running kernel. Yow!

The most useable source-level debugger I've used so far as gdb; I seem to
recall having confused it more than once, but it isn't so fragile as dbx.


One thing I'd insist on: a debugger should have a line-oriented interface.
If you want to do a full-screen or graphic interface on _top_ of it, like
dbxtool under SunTools or like gdb-mode in GNU Emacs, well that is terrific,
and I like using those interfaces, when I can. But if it doesn't have a
plain line mode that I can run from within an editing window, and copy stack
traces into bug reports and so on, then it just isn't as useful.

-Bennett
[e-mail]