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From: paj@mrcu (Paul Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Eiffel Problems, Problems, Problems
Message-ID: <476@argus.mrcu>
Date: 26 Mar 90 10:03:02 GMT
References: <2983@goanna.oz.au> <5983@star.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: paj@uk.co.gec-mrc (Paul Johnson)
Organization: GEC-Marconi Research Centre, Great Baddow, UK
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>	   Does anyone out there actually USE the viewer for debugging ?
>	   If not, how do they manage debugging.


>                                 Jos Warmer
>				 jos@cs.vu.nl
>				 ...uunet!mcvax!cs.vu.nl!jos


I use the viewer, but it is not satisfactory.  The lack of breakpoints
is a pain, but the inclusion of assertions largely makes up for it:
the assertions trap a problem before it goes too far, and rather than
putting in traditional breakpoints to try to track a problem back to
its cause, I usually put in a group of extra assertions instead.
These do not then need to be taken out (unless they are VERY slow to
evaluate) until the software is delivered.

The viewers inability to get at local variables is a major pain.  I
often wind up making things features of the outer class when they
should be local to a particular routine, simply so that the viewer can
access them.  Inability to move up and down the call stack is a
related problem.  Can this be fixed?

I would also like to get specific traces (eg trace STRING.equal) a la
dbx.

Also the viewer sometimes starts up before the backtrace has finished.
This is a pain.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Johnson                               UUCP: <world>!mcvax!ukc!gec-mrc!paj
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