Re: Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Charles Hixson wrote:
> Somehow I tend to feel that both extremes are wrong here.  Yes, one should
> write the best code that one can.  Yes, one should include all reasonable
> error checks. (A few kind words for Design By Contract go here.) But one
> still needs debugging tools.  The less you use them, the friendlier they
> need to be.  Once upon a time I used to read core dumps, but I haven't
> looked at one in the last 10 years.  I haven't written assembler in the last
> 15+.  So to help me much debugger needs to be symbolic, and tied in a useful
> way to the source level of the code that it is being applied to.

In some environments, debuggers (or what would pass for one) are a way
of life. In embedded systems programming you need a debugger or
something very similar just to be able to watch the code execute and see
if it is behaving as expected.

When I build things for a workstation or a PC, often I find I build code
with built-in Put_Line statements that are toggleable on/off for similar
reasons. I either embed them in "pragma Debug" statements or have some
runtime selectable debug switch controlling output. It gives me the
ability to trace what the code is doing and look at important data as I
am developing the code. This may be why I have not turned on a debugger
in a workstation environment in years. I never get to the point where I
can't see what the code is doing without a debugger.

Of course, when called on to work on other people's code, we have a
whole different situation... :-)

MDC
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