Re: New Debugger

[Dave.Touretzky@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU]

Bill,

Your note about the debugger seemed to cover all the usual features one
would want.  I'm concerned about a few issues which I think are more than
just "user interface" sugar.  First, I want to make sure that we can
display the lexical environment associated with a stack frame.  That is, I
should be able to (optionally) see all the local variables bound in the
current lexical context, including args, &aux variables, LET and LET*
bindings, and so on.  In a backtrace, it should be possible to display all
the locals bound at each context.  I realize this might not be possible for
compiled code.  I'm mostly concerned with the interpreter.

Second, I want to be able to optionally see the WHOLE lexical environment,
including local function definitions, block names, and go tags, plus
dynamic environment things like catch frames and special bindings.  We can
discuss later the format in which this stuff should be displayed.  My
concern now is that the information be AVAILABLE for display.

Finally, you should give some thought to debugging CLOS code.  Will special
debugger facilities be necessary for dealing with method invocation?  I'm
not a CLOS user yet so I don't have any suggestions, but my intuition is
that this is a place where we could do some innovative, interesting things
in a new debugger.

-- Dave