On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 11:49:23AM +0000, Dirk Koopman said: > This is all a great mystery to me. Perhaps doing this for nigh on 30 > years has made me an old codger, but: why do you need some snazzy > windowing pretty debugger?
When I was at college we learnt to program (as opposed to what I'd been doing before which I though was programming because I didn't know any better) using a language called Turing (specifically OOT, Object Orientated Turing) which was a bit vrufty but had nice features that taught me quite a bit. One of the ncie things it did have was a visual debugger - the source code was stepped through line by line, highlighting each line as it went through and there was a window open for the global scope. When you entered a new scope a new window popped open with the new variables IIRC. Either way I found it easy to debug things like the 3D engine I wrote in it because I could simultaneosuly keep the graphics window open, the source code open and have the variable scope open - beingable to comapre the value of a variable back through scopes was useful. Personally I found it easier to use than the text debugger but that's just personal choice. I liek that the information was ever present and that I could get a sense of what was happening just by the way things were appearing and disapearing from the screen. I'm not saying that textual debuggers are bad but I do think that the visualisations are handy sometimes. YMMV etc etc Simon -- the test for truth is still quicker than the addition
