[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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