Is there plan for Source Debuger?

[Gert Veldhuijzen van Zanten]

rinus plasmeijer wrote:
> 
> Marko Srepfler wrote:
> >
> > Is there plan for Clean debuger, with step,view,inspect?
> > It would be great help for Clean novices (me).
> 
> No, there is not.
> 
> You can use the trace function (defined in StdErr) to trace the
> evaluation.
> There is a time and space profiler to inspect time and space
> consumption.
> 
> It would be great to have a nice debugger.
> The main problem is that so many transformations take place in the
> Clean compiler that the correspondence between source code and final
> program is hard to explain to the ignorence user.

Isn't it possible to add a debug option to the compiler, that would
also prevent the hard-to-explain transformations to be done? 
Or even nicer; annotations that prevent transformations in certain
functions, and switch on debugging.
Obviously, the price would be that programs compiled with the debug 
option run much slower, but at least one can see what happens.
An alternative would be to have a Clean interpreter, with debugging.

Without such a debugger, it would still be nice if there were a general 
debug function, that could print whatever data structure. I'm
programming 
in Clean now for about 3 years, and it turns out that I'm spending a lot 
of time writing toString functions for debugging purposes only.
My guess is that such a function is already present somewhere in the
run-time kernel, as it is used to print the result of the program
(Start).

I really like the language Clean, and I am impressed by the wonderful
job 
that the Clean team has pulled off. But currently, I regard the weak 
debugging facilities as the most important reason (if not the only) why 
I might at some point choose another language.


-- 
Gert Veldhuijzen van Zanten      P.O. Box 513, NL-5600 MB  Eindhoven
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