>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.
Genau. I don't think many of us would stand up and say we are on a par with Larry and
programming in Perl, perhaps he only needs the print statement to solve any problem he
comes across. I suspect given that he wrote it in the first place, perhaps he has a
sort of built-in debugger in his brain, anyway.
?-)
>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.
>
Further; if the original gets changed, (via a few 'harmless' print statements), you no
longer have the original code, even if it (allegedly) _looks_ the same. People in my
experience, often forget or never realize, that one of the major advantages of the
debugger is being able to modify the runtime behaviour of the code without modifying
the code itself.
>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.
>
Programmers who assume anything about their program while debugging, are very often
misled, just as Generals in historic battles very often get their army slaughtered,
via _assuming_ the enemy will do a particular thing, instead of keeping an open mind,
and a flexible approach to the prevailing circumstances.
Slightly off-topic perhaps, but the principle is the same.
Richard Foley
---
Ciao - shorter than Aufwiedersehen
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