>
> I'm looking forward to when I'm familiar enough with this for to be
> part of my instinctive workflow. I get the feeling this will
> revolutionize how our systems can be debugged. Often I might have an
> object I want to investigate but not know where to break into the code
> to learn about it. Sometimes thats putting halts in all accessors,
> but that is tedious.
>
> Now to make it easier to use what would be good is something like...
> anObject haltOnNextAccess.
> which enables halt once just for this breakpoint (I presume this might
> be possible)
> Also maybe...
> anObject haltOnEveryAccess.
> anObject haltOnEveryAccessFor: 5 seconds.
>
Yes, and imagine it deeply integrated with the IDE: you can put
a (conditional, object specific) halt on anything, there will be a light-wight
“watcher” to look at values of variables and values, and so on...
> On another track, is/can there be a facility that logs access rather
> than halting. Sometimes you get a faster understanding from observing
> a lot of movement from further away than from freezing things and
> going a step at a time from inside. Currently I sometimes find the
> following helpful...
> Transcript crShow: thisContext printString ,'<<', thisContext
> sender printString ,'<<', thisContext sender sender printString
> but its tedious to plug into several locations. Maybe this could be
> something like...
> anObject traceEveryAccessFor: 10 seconds contextDepth: 3.
>
Ah, that’s a nice idea…. imagine that not with Transcript output
but a special tool somehow… a bit like a halt that does not halt
yet visualises the stack (execution flow) at a point in the code.
Marcus
