On Friday 14 August 2009 16:18:38 Shawn H. Corey wrote:
> Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > My recent impression of most Perl programmers has been the opposite -
> > most of them have been too lazy or unmotivated to learn about the perl -d
> > flag (or similar interactive debuggers), and are always using print's or
> > going on IRC asking "What is wrong with this code?" I find the perl
> > debugger an indispensable tool and am actively using it.
> >
> > While print's have their rightful place, I still think the perl debugger
> > is too under-used.
>
> "We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a
> programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- Larry Wall
> from http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
>
> The last time I used a debugger was on a large C project. For small
> programs and unit testing, it was fine, but when things went over 2000
> lines, it became increasingly frustrating to use. Of course, print
> statements have their limits too but it happens at about 5000 lines.
According to SLOCCount by David A. Wheeler, for Freecell Solver's
trunk/fc-solve/source :
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic: 16832 (80.85%)
perl: 2914 (14.00%)
python: 446 (2.14%)
sh: 354 (1.70%)
ruby: 274 (1.32%)
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 20,820
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
I've successfully used gdb on this application, and I used it in the past,
before I heavily refactored and trimmed it lately. Granted, it's an almost
pure ANSI C program that doesn't do a lot of system stuff, but it is still
pretty complex and pedantic. I've also used gdb on the GIMP and Subversion,
which are much larger than Freecell Solver. In Subversion I ran into a (yet
another) gdb bug, but they are otherwise OK.
I'm using debuggers simply because I know it's often faster and quicker to use
them than to use traces. I'm not saying traces don't have their place, but
debuggers are often time saving.
I also wrote some gdb scripts:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux...@cs.huji.ac.il/msg54660.html
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
>
> I use Data::Dumper a lot, so most of my debugging statements have
> "Dumper" in them, making them easy to find. For those that don't, I add
> "# TEMPORARY" at the end. And I leave them behind; I just put a "#" in
> front of them. :)
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
Stop Using MSIE - http://www.shlomifish.org/no-ie/
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