Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!arisia!fischer
From: fischer@arisia.Xerox.COM (Ronald A. Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Debug techniques. What's your favorite?
Summary: compress redundancies
Message-ID: <666@arisia.Xerox.COM>
Date: 3 Apr 89 19:17:24 GMT
References: <1499@wasatch.UUCP>
Organization: Xerox PARC
Lines: 18

A specific feature I'd like to see: in the stack trace, don't show all
of a repeated series of same name calls.  For long runs of calls
display one of them an elipsis and then continue with the others.

Features I use the most are: window based frame and data inspection,
reverting to a a previous stack frame, breaking and continuing in
roughly that order.  In a system with lightweight processes I also
find it very useful to have a mouse selectable list of these which
allows breaking one or inspecting their property lists.

If someone were going to try and make a "big leap forward" I would
encourage them to consider merging the editor and debugger so that the
programmer is presented with one consistent environment.  Source code
displayed from a running state would be annotated to show current
values of variables, etc.  This is not a big jump from DBX.  An
excellent example of this is Lucid's proposed Cadillac programming
environment (contact them for more information).

(ron)