Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!lzaz!bds
From: bds@lzaz.ATT.COM (B.SZABLAK)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Future of Minix
Summary: Bite the bullet
Message-ID: <697@lzaz.ATT.COM>
Date: 17 Jul 89 13:23:33 GMT
References: <19654@louie.udel.EDU> <2885@ast.cs.vu.nl> <568@amms4.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T ISL Lincroft NJ USA
Lines: 22

In article <568@amms4.UUCP>, hjg@amms4.UUCP (Harry Gross) writes:
> In article <2885@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
> >In article <19654@louie.udel.EDU> V61%DHDURZ1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Ronald Lamprecht) writes:
> >>The additional code should
> >>be included in #ifdef DEBUG -- #endif so that it is possible to generate
> >>a fast run-time library and a debugging library version. 
> >Argh!  I think #ifdefs make code very hard to read and ugly.  I am not all
> >that wild about the idea.
> 
> Any further comments Andy?  Or anyone else?

Yeah, prints are a pretty crude way to debug (albeit sometimes unavoidable).
Why not bite the bullet and use a debugger? Sounds like this is more
appropriate to an "instructional" system anyway. This may have passed by the
PC users, but I have posted the mods for ptrace(2) for the Atari ST which
should be easily ported to the PC (any intention of picking this up
Andy?), and a debugger (mdb) which is somewhat 68000 specific (namely the
disassembler and register handling).

By the way, if the ACK compiler could include the filename and linenumber
info in the a.out file, that would significantly improve the debugger's
utility.