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From: palmer@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU (Bill Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: THE DEBUGGER (& macnosy)
Message-ID: <1542@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Sun, 26-Apr-87 13:20:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: Shasta.1542
Posted: Sun Apr 26 13:20:41 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Apr-87 02:47:45 EDT
References: <496@howtek.UUCP> <1536@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: palmer@Shasta.UUCP (Bill Palmer)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 37
Keywords: macnosy

I bought a copy of "The Debugger" back in January.  Steve has been extremely
helpful in terms of bug fixes, explaining undocumented features, implementing
suggestions, etc.  My only exposure to TMON has been through Knaster's book,
so I can't comment on the relative strengths and weakness of the two, but
T.D. must surely be far ahead by now.

The printed documentation is pretty skimpy.  However, the program has on-line
documentation (just like MacNosy) which is fairly good.  Steve tells me that
he is planning to get nice documentation (like the orange Nosy booklet)
written up soon, but the program is still in quite a bit of flux.  Stan Krute
is doing the doc, so if you liked the Nosy booklet, you should like this.

I've found T.D. to be invaluable in shaking out subtle bugs that would be
difficult to impossible to find with MacsBug.  Being able to get formatted
dumps of all the Mac data structures is quite handy.  The latest versions
now understand Lightspeed C project files, so you don't need the Nosy pass
in there if you have the project file.

I've had two difficulties with the program.  First, there isn't any convenient
way to get it to stay there in the background until something happens - you
run it and it runs the problem program after hooking itself into everything.
When you shut down the problem program, you shut down T.D.  This is good
for those without extra memory, because it likes to grab 400K or more before
it runs your program.  The combination of only 1 meg of memory and no hard
disk can be somewhat inconvenient to use - having more memory or a hard disk
makes things much more convenient.

If you have an E-Machines Big Picture display, you can have all the debugger
windows on one screen and the problem program's windows on the other.  I wish
I had the ability to use this feature!

If anyone has specific questions about the program, I'd be happy to answer
them and/or pass them along to Steve.

Bill Palmer
whp4@csli.stanford.edu
decwrl!labrea!comie couderre