[gambit-list] DrScheme and GambitC

Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva asandroq at gmail.com
Tue Sep 2 12:48:21 EDT 2008


Hallo,

William Cook wrote:
> 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.
> 

      Fair enough. Once more, I hope your project goes well, it may help 
me bring more people to Scheme.

> 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.
> 

      Maybe when you "get inside" you'll find out that you really don't 
need to spend so much time debugging, and the Lisp productivity boost is 
more than a legend. :-)

Cheers,
-alex
http://www.ventonegro.org/



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