Xref: utzoo comp.lang.smalltalk:670 comp.lang.c++:1577
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pdn!reggie
From: reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: OO debuggers
Message-ID: <4302@pdn.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 88 11:31:53 GMT
References: <3930@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation,   Largo FL
Lines: 38

In article <3930@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> jans@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Jan Steinman) writes:
>In article: <37100002@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk> Jan Andrew Purchase
>(purchase@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk) writes:
>><...this lack of debugging tools is not confined to the OO domain. I defy you 
>>to show you one generally-available debugger that is the least bit 
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>"innovative".>

       Notice the operative adjective.


>C++ has a lot of catching up to do, but it seems to be evolving strictly in the
>incestuous C-Unix environment.  It currently provides nowhere near the 
>productivity nor capability (except in execution speed, the least important 
>metric in the present "software crisis") of even a moderate Smalltalk 
>implementation, nor will it as long as people are thinking of dbx as the model 
>to improve upon!  


      Tom Cargill's Pi (Process Inspector) debugger is a step in the right
direction in the UNIX-C Domain.  Unfortunately, it is only available on the
research editions of UNIX.  With bit-mapped displays becoming more prevelant
these days, perhaps we shall see more efforts like this appear as commercial
products.  We need more than a fancy UI for dbx!  See the following papers:


	T. A. Cargill, "The Feel of Pi", 1986 Winter USENIX Conference
Proceedings, pp. 62-71.

	T.A. Cargill, "Pi: A Case Study in Object-Oriented Programming",
OOPSLA'86 Conference Proceedings, pp. 350-360.


-- 
George W. Leach					Paradyne Corporation
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