Xref: utzoo comp.lang.eiffel:1431 comp.lang.objective-c:178
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!bony1!richieb
From: richieb@bony1.bony.com (Richard Bielak)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.objective-c
Subject: Re: Whose debugger is better, Eiffel or Objective C?
Keywords: viewer debuggers eiffel
Message-ID: <1991Feb26.153112.24437@bony1.bony.com>
Date: 26 Feb 91 15:31:12 GMT
References: <1991Feb26.045704.11186@ecst.csuchico.edu>
Reply-To: richieb@bony1.UUCP (Richard Bielak)
Organization: Bank of New York
Lines: 61

In article <1991Feb26.045704.11186@ecst.csuchico.edu> brianm@ecst.csuchico.edu (Brian Meyerpeter) writes:
>
>
>I am currently doing some research on debugging systems for object oriented 
>environments.  I have just finished looking at the Eiffel docs and what they
>call a debugger.  I called ISE and asked, "Does Eiffel have a debugger?"
>They said of course.  After my studies and $200 for the docs I would beg to
>differ.  They have a class viewer that really doesn't do much.
>
>I would like to hear someone's experience with view in Eiffel.  Do you
>really use it?  Would you have liked something better?


I have used the class viewer to debug Eiffel programs. I think it is
better than it sounds from the description in the manual. Its major
shortcoming is that you cannot set break points in your code (well,
you can sort of insert breakpoints by placing "View(Current)" calls in
you code, but that requires recompiling).

However, the Viewer makes testing of single classes *very* easy.  With
the viewer you can execute each routine within a class "by hand" and
examine the results. This is made especially easy by the Eiffel tester
("et") which will generate a dummy root class, compile it, run it and
put in the viewer.

This way you can make sure that one class works properly, before it is
added to a larger program. This is not that easy to do in other
languages.

You can not only test your programs, but also find out how library
classes behave. For example, I wanted to find out how the FILE class
can be used to read directories. I did this without writing a single
line of code with the command "et file".

I never used "gdbg", but I use VAX/VMS debugger extensively. The VMS
debugger is very good. The only debugger that I think is better, is
the Benchmark Modula-2 debugger on the Amiga.

Let me know if you have further questions.


...richie


P.S. 

Here is a wild suggestion for a future debugger. It would be nice if
the debugger kept track of which routines were tested. This way you
could get a report or a warning at system build time that would list
the code that was never executed.






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