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From: "Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com>
Subject: Re: Printing Enum Variable Re: Linux World
Date: 1999/03/05
Message-ID: <7bp3k5$b7p$2@plug.news.pipex.net>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-03-05T00:00:00+00:00
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fraser@sinopsis.com wrote in message <7bmua7$qg9$1@remarQ.com>...
[...]
|Not enumeration strings in particular, but debuggers in general.  I always
|found that most of the 'a-ha' moments while using a debugger were related
|coming to a sudden understanding of what the code was trying to do.
|
|If you eliminate the debugger, then you're forced to start with this
|understanding.  I think that's profitable.  If I let myself run to gdb
|every time something goes wrong, then I'll be forever patching symptoms
|instead of causes, and it will probably take longer to sort things
|out anyway.


I've had contact with a lot of different programmers, and I find that some
rely heavily on debuggers, and some eschew them (as I do myself most of the
time), but, and this is the big but, BUT, both groups seem to do as well as
each other in terms of debugging speed and accuracy.  Conclusion: provide a
good debugger; provide other debugging support (e.g. assertion, stack
traceback, exception diagnosis, a pop-up eror message message facility,
etc.); leave it to the user to choose.

|My debugging tools are a trace, Emacs and a nice stout.  Actually, the
stout
|is optional, but hey, the first one doesn't hurt.  Saying no to the second
|hurts a _lot_ though.


I think most programmers will agree, you need quite a high pain threshold to
make a living out of programming computers.  (Masochistic tendencies help
:-)

|First, look the code.  If that doesn't help, follow the trace.  If it still
|doesn't help, drink the stout and repeat.

This is (nearly) always my style.  It's incredibale how you can stare at a
small piece of code, sometimes literally for hours, and only _then_ see the
'obvious' error.  But even I would attest that a really good debugger (and
most, admittedly, are pretty crap) can be most enlightening sometimes
(sometimes, note).

-------------------------------------
Nick Roberts
-------------------------------------