#77 Debug probe enhancements

[Billy B]

Debug probe is a good addition. How hard would it be
to make it act more like a full-featured shell? I.e.,

- have a promt so you can tell tell that it's waiting
for your input,

- respond after just one 'enter' instead of two,

- print out the value of variables by just typing the
variable name (instead of having to type "print
variable_name")

- cycle through your command history with keys like
up/down-arrow or ctrl-up/down-arrow

- auto-completion of symbols

Ideally it would be nice to just have something like
pycrust right there in a tab instead of "Console".
Stani's Python Editor has pycrust built-in like that,
but unfortunately it's not connected in any way to your
executing program, so it's not so useful. Apparently
the Wing IDE Pro version does this well too, though I
haven't tried it.

Extra commentary:

The ultimate debugger, based on debuggers I'm familiar
with, would be a hybrid of that in VisualStudio crossed
with Matlab. VisualStudio does variable and watches
nicely. It's got a list (several lists actually) like
Eclipse's 'Expressions', but you can double click to
add a new expression or edit an expression. Eclipse is
pretty close there, just needs a more efficient way to
edit the expressions. The Matlab debugger, on the
other hand, completely lacks an expression list, but
its best feature is that when you hit a breakpoint, you
just have your normal interactive shell prompt there
with all it's features, plus all your program's state
loaded in memory. This is an excellent debugging model
for a dynamic programming language in my opinion. If
there's some error on the current line, you can quickly
try out a bunch of variations to figure out what the
proper expression is to get the result you want, using
the actual data from your program, without having to
cook up a stand-alone test case that creates data
similar to what's in your program.

[Don Taylor]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1267423

+1 vote for this feature.

One advantage of the debug probe as it is set up right now
is that it is easy to cut and paste between the console and
the editor without having to remove ">>>" characters. So
there should be a way to retain easy cut and paste from
console to editor.

[Fabio Zadrozny]

Logged In: YES
user_id=617340
Originator: NO

Note:
- the 'print' is no longer required (for some versions already)
- pydev 1.3.15 has a new interpreter that can do what you want (but it's still not connected to the debugger -- but it's in my plans to do so later).