From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border1.nntp.dca3.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 17:59:24 -0500 From: Dennis Lee Bieber Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Gnat 2013 is out! Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:59:25 -0400 Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn Message-ID: <4taq191qkdba1kcqkps4iqe6t94t1bf1qc@4ax.com> References: X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 6.00/32.1186 X-No-Archive: YES MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 108.73.116.27 X-Trace: sv3-yhV3aoaI2+vA317HuaCrywCPU2TD7B7Vnw21qNhI4GiNvUKMlucvk0+DHK+HAfMfSi3fGTVgqhP4Y+z!n4gUlRJdTRp0r7Oj92wO0MNdagu8g/onxIG35bqCwKvlKZrVs4kkjKrlP7pJslXoKnsjFdqQAfqu!rpuiwzu9sqItSZIRA7ODmX1TNLg= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 4526 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:183167 Date: 2013-08-27T18:59:25-04:00 List-Id: On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:05:20 -0400, wilson declaimed the following: >On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:08:34 -0400, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) > wrote: > >> I personally did not used a debugger since Borland Turbo Pascal. I first >> missed it (at that time GDB for C programs had issues on Windows 3.1), >> but quickly figured a debugger only show you one particular path in your >> logic, and above all, consume a lot of your time to just follow this >> path, a lot of time which is not used to understand the properties of >> the whole. >> >> >> When something really drives me crazy, I just add a “sentinel” which >> prints out some information (just requires an “with Ada.Text_IO” and a >> line added somewhere to print an “Element'Image”) I fill to not track >> correctly, to help me a bit. Then, back to global understanding as soon >> as possible. >> >> Another issue, is that a program is not always running in a debugger, >> and so what when something went wrong while it was not running in a >> debugger and you don't have a complete and exact snapshot of the >> program's state when it get wrong? Here, a logger surely help more than >> a debugger, as it may be active all the time (most platform provides an >> API to help automatically manage logs and avoid these logs to fill all >> of your storage space). > >Thank you for saying something I have felt for years. I always felt odd >man out for this approach and it is good to have someone else say the same >thing. I've only made significant use of one debugger -- the one on DEC VMS. The VMS debugger is basically one big exception handler with ties to embedded debug information (mainly tags for source file/version/line number, and symbol table). The only other debugger I even touched was the one in LS-DOS (TRS-80). And that was mainly because the "advanced" debugger mode included commands to do raw sector I/O on the floppy drives (including command to write the special directory block disk header). Why? I received an O/S update disk that had a bad sector. With some work I was able to determine which file was bad. I then compared the sectors of my working O/S disk to the bad one, WRT that file. I determined the sectors before and after the bad one had one or two bytes different -- namely, the bytes that changed the default layout for the directory display. So I used the debugger to duplicate all of the update disk except for the bad sector, which I then copied over from my working disk. The new disk worked well, and I sent the bad disk back to the maker with a description of the problem. (I believe the update was to handle larger date ranges -- the original LS-DOS/TRS-DOS used a 3-bit YEAR, essentially 1977 [78?] to 1984 [85?]; the update removed user-passwords from directory entries to expand the date... Y2K had nothing on the TRS-80 Files had owner and user passwords, but how many people are going to use owner password to set a file read-only, AND then require a user password just to read the file...) -- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/