[plt-scheme] debugging [mini rant]

On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 00:23 +0200, Jens Axel Søgaard wrote:
> 2009/7/28 Paulo J. Matos <pocmatos at gmail.com>:
> > On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 16:12 -0500, Mike Eggleston wrote:
> 
> >> Is there a command line debugger in mzscheme?
> 
> > - Is a command line debugger planned?
> 
> I am curious, do you use debuggers in other programming environments?
> If so, in which situations do you find them useful?
> 

Yes, I use gdb a lot with C and C++. I find them very useful to step
through some piece of code which is generating a strange value. 

For me they are particularly useful when debugging algorithms that
either involve a lot of mathematics or which has a complex flow.

DrScheme at the moment, which has a debugging function, is still not up
to standard when you have to do this type of debugging. Or at least I
feel in those cases better to fill my code with printfs which would
probably be useless if I had a command line debugger (or if the debugger
was better integrated into DrScheme, even though I would still prefer
the former).

When trying to use DrScheme debug function, values most of the times
print outside the allocated space for it, making it basically useless.
If I can't inspect values, the debugging is useless with the exception
of being able where the code if flowing to.

> /Jens Axel