Re: [Sbcl-devel] Debugger verbiage

[Daniel B. <da...@te...>]

I expect everyone to jump in on this thread ...

William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...> writes:

> And -- likely the core of our differences about verbosity here -- I
> don't really expect experienced users to see this message at all. Why
> not just set *DEBUG-BEGINNER-HELP-P* to NIL?

Um.  I think the verbosity complaint is actually made on behalf of
newbies: Nielsen's First Law of Computer Documentation, and all that.
Here's my contribution -

 -----
* ^C
debugger invoked on SIMPLE-CONDITION in thread 5382:
  interrupted at #X40117A72

Type HELP for debugger help, (SB-EXT:QUIT) to exit from SBCL.
The SIMPLE-CONDITION is bound to *DEBUG-CONDITION*. 

restarts (type number or unique prefix of name):
  0: [CONTINUE] Return from SB-UNIX:SIGINT.
  1: [ABORT   ] Reduce debugger level (leaving debugger, returning to toplevel).
  2: [TOPLEVEL] Restart at toplevel READ/EVAL/PRINT loop.
("foreign function call land: ra=#x805ACF1")
0] 0
 -----

Changes: 

(1) omitted "condition of type" from initial "debugger invoked"
    message; condition classes are pretty much always descriptive of
    the problem.  It would neat if the second line could be
    appended to the first where that wouldn't cause it to wrap:
    calling FORMAT experts ...

debugger invoked on SIMPLE-CONDITION in thread 5382: interrupted at #X40117A72

(2) Prose rewritten in more telegraphic style ("IN DEBUGGER STOP
    HELP TO GET HELP STOP") making it short enough that it's
    probably tolerable even for experienced users.  This means 
    we can move *DEBUG-BEGINNER-HELP-P* advice into the manual/HELP text
    even if that means fewer people need/see it.

(3) Used shorter words in header describing restarts.

(4) Optionally, could even demote the message about *DEBUG-CONDITION*
    to manual/HELP text. I don't think I've ever needed it except in
    freaky error-in-recursive-debug situations

While we're here, how about shortening the startup banner a bit too?

 -----
This is SBCL 0.8.5.37, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.  
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
 -----

This brings us down to about the same size of startup banner as gdb -
i.e. less than half the height of an 80x24 xterm.  It's four years and
significant development effort since the CMUCL fork, I think we're
sufficiently different to them that we don't need to acknowledge the
debt on every startup.  Not denying that they deserve credit, but it's
fairly obvious in the manual, the web pages, etc where we came from.


-dan

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