[gambit-list] DrScheme and GambitC

William Cook wcook at cs.utexas.edu
Tue Sep 2 10:06:09 EDT 2008


Alex and Joel,

I have been using the text-based debugger in Gambit for about 6 months. I know about 
",s", ",e", ",b" and friends. I have dug into the Gambit code and am using the 
underlying functions to connect these facilities to the Eclipse debugger GUI. Gambit 
is reasonable in this respect, although the lack of breakpoints is annoying. I looked 
into other versions of Scheme, and as far as I can tell Gambit's underlying 
capabilities for debugging are better than most. But I'm tired of typing commands, 
and I'm tired of copying variable names so that I can execute them. I'm tired of 
writing my own inspectors to get views of my objects. This is all much harder than it 
should be, and in the long run it reduces my debugging productivity significantly, 
over using a good graphical debugger. To me, a REPL is not a debugger. Maybe 20 years 
ago it would be acceptable, but not now. I'm willing to put up with it because I need 
to use Scheme. I'm specifically talking about debugging here, not other aspects of 
the development environment.

I can see that there is a culture clash here. I know I'm representing a view that is 
a minority on this list. But I'm looking at Scheme from the outside, and this is how 
it seems to me.

William



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