In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Richard Foley) writes: >Pros and cons: > > http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=3D48474
I was about to add to the thread when I saw how old it was. So I'll take it up here. Both of the last poster's requirements are satisfied by the debugger; break settings can be saved from one run to the next by restarting with 'R' and not exiting the debugger. And you can execute a script of debugger commands with the 'source' command I added in 5.8.0. As to the arguments for not using the debugger, they sound somewhat religious. I'm not about to claim Larry is wrong for not using it. I know there are situations I have been in where it would have taken me a lot longer without the debugger to find out what was wrong. Recent case in point: someone on perl-beginners was getting an unexpected result from Net::Whois::IP. I ran their program through the debugger and stepped through the methods until I found out that it was incorrectly querying a parent handle, and saw why. I suggested a patch on the list and to the module author. If I'd not had the debugger, I'd have had to read a lot more of the module than was necessary, find it, copy it to ., make it writable, insert print statements, etc, then finally remove the module. Quite clearly would have taken far longer. If someone has the experience to know what this debugger can do, and then decides it's not worth their time, leave them be. It's the ones who don't know how to use it who *assume* it's not worth their time who should at least try it out. -- Peter Scott http://www.perldebugged.com
