On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 3:47 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlo...@shlomifish.org> wrote:
> Hi Rocky, > > On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:40:53 -0400 > Rocky Bernstein <rocky.bernst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > http://perldoc.perl.org/DB.html mentions a "programmatic interface to > > the Perl debugging API". > > > > As far as I can tell it hasn't really changed at all since Perl 5.8 > > and not much between that and 5.6 except bug fixes. Why was this not > > more widely adopted? > > I guess not too many people need to write custom debuggers. I am weary of arguments of the form because if X isn't used much something that X attempts to address is not needed by too many people. First, from what I've seen there have been a number of "custom debuggers" including a large number of customization of perl5db: for remote execution or handling syntax highlighting. I just became aware of a recent YAPC paper on trying to automatically figure out when an input line in perl5db is not finished so as to offer another read rather than eval the line. And consider dtrace which is popular. From what I understand, that is used for custom tracing which to me amounts to the same thing as debugging. dtrace doesn't sport a REPL although one could probably add that into the callback. Now back to the DB module. Although it may appear to advertise itself as for writing REPL debuggers, it doesn't have to be used that way. So perhaps the DB API module was not advertising itself in not the most encompassing way. One of the ideas that I think is right about the DB module is the fact that programs can register for a callback. Supposedly DB handles all of the lower-level boilerplate DB module stuff. One might imagine registering a callback when various events occur to be something that should be put in the Perl core, but since all of this code can be written in Perl (as evidence by the DB module), why then put it in the Perl core? And finally coming back to the original question, I was hoping that someone who was working on perl5db at the time could elaborate on what specifically happened here, rather than speculatively what might have happened. > Furthermore, it > seems that many Perl developers avoid using the debugger in favour of print > statements and other stuff like that. > > Regards, > > Shlomi Fish > > -- > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ > What Makes Software Apps High Quality - http://shlom.in/sw-quality > > Quark: “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. But only for your > customers”. > Rule of acquisition No. 172. > — Star Trek, “We, the Living Dead” by Shlomi Fish > > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . >
