Re: Gnat 2013 is out!

[wilson <winslole@udayton.edu>]

On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:08:34 -0400, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)  
<yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:

> Le Fri, 31 May 2013 18:12:29 +0200, <dptrash@arcor.de> a écrit:
>
>> May I ask, how you debug Ada programs? Do you use GNATbench 2.7 for  
>> that? I need a good debugging tool :-)
>
> 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.
>
> So instead of trying to fix something in a particular path — ignoring  
> the whole and so probably introducing a new bug elsewhere in the while —  
> I would say it's surely better to understand the whole and so not rely  
> on a debugger. A debugger never gives you such a picture, only analysis  
> and understand gives this to you.
>
> 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.
>
> A program is not a single path and a particular property of a particular  
> state as exposed by a debugger, it's multitude of possible paths and  
> general properties common to a multitude of possible states (that's what  
> you have to track, not a single path). In short, a debugger gives you a  
> wrong picture, except if you are at the very beginning and try to figure  
> out what's a programming language and how a state machine (like a  
> computer is) works.
>
> 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.
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