Re: [Pydev-code] [ANN] Pydev and Pydev Extensions 1.0.2 release

[Bill B. <wb...@gm...>]

Hi there,

On 2/17/06, Fabio Zadrozny <fa...@es...> wrote:
>
>
> - New feature in the debugger: the console is available for probing when
> in 'suspendend mode'
>
> This is a pretty great addition.  How hard would it be to make it act mor=
e
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 (instea=
d
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 lik=
e
that, but unfortunately it's not connected in any way to your executing
program, so it's not so useful.

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 o=
r
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 whe=
n
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 dat=
a
similar to what's in your program.

Regards,
Bill Baxter