"Alex" == Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva asandroq@gmail.com writes:
Alex> You say that nor quack neither gambit.el have a debugger, but Alex> the REPL *is* the debugger! You have backtraces, you can Alex> resume from an exception, you can see the environment of any Alex> frame etc. It's all there, it's not just behind shiny Alex> icons, it's in the REPL.
True. In my quick tour of debuggers over the past week, I've often read "Unfortunately this only works from the command-line," many times (here's one: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7876). How is that unfortunate?
As Alex says, Lisp is the ultimate debugger anyway --- Lisp systems had debuggers before Python, Ruby et al even existed. Where do you think they got the idea? Lisp machines had source debuggers for the entire operating system, and Emacs works on the same principle, with interactive debuggers available.
Saying that a language is incomplete without an interactive debugger is a little misleading: I've gotten a lot of use out of Scheme over the past two years, and have only started using "real debuggers" (i.e. not the REPL) in the past two weeks.
Joel