I've also used Visual Studio, and I wouldn't mind having something
like that for Haskell. But I have to agree with Jon, I think the
best way of debugging is to understand your code. I think people who
come from imperative programming come with a mind set that you
understand your code by stepping through it in the debugger. But I
find this paradigm much less useful for functional code.
-- Lennart
On Sep 6, 2006, at 06:22 , Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
But why should c and d exist at runtime? They're only used
once each, so the compiler is free to replace f with
\a b -> (a+b)+ a*b
Yes, and if the compiler is this clever, it should also be free to
replace them back at debug time.
I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating: in
most cases, if you need to debug your programme it's because
it's too complicated for you to understand, so the correct
thing to do is to simplify it and try again.
That makes it impossible to ever improve - initially all programs are
beyond you, and only by pushing the boundary do you get anywhere. As
for me, I always write programs I can't understand, and that no one
else can. Perhaps I understood it when I originally wrote it, perhaps
not, but that was maybe over a year ago.
It's been my experience that debugging is a serious weakness of
Haskell - where even the poor mans printf debugging changes the
semantics! And everyone comes up with arguments why there is no need
to debug a functional language - that sounds more like excuses about
why we can't build a good lazy debugger :)
[Sorry for the slight rant, but I've used Visual Studio C++ so I know
what a good debugger looks like, and how indispensable they are]
Thanks
Neil
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