Debugging Approaches in CL - Part 2
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
A while ago, I posted about debugging approaches in CL. In that posting, I mentioned that there were a variety of different debugging approaches in CL and included snippets from others describing how they debug CL. Well, there was a recent thread on c.l.l. that discussed debugging approaches and it had a few good postings that are worthwhile having a look at:
- Joel Ray Holveck provided a tutorial-like series of examples that illustrated how the debugger in SLIME could be used to debug a trip to Jupiter (ala HAL in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie). Joel also gives a good overview (with examples) of CL condition handling in the latter half of his post.
- Antonio Menezes Leitao made available an English translation of a paper in Portugese that he had written a few years ago on debugging using Franz' Allegro CL and ELI. It was originally intended as a guide for his students for their debugging sessions.
- One of the problems with debugging in CL is that (unless you use a common debugging environment such as that provided by SLIME), you are constrained by the debugging implementation provided by your CL vendor. This can be bothersome if you use multiple CL implementations. Duane Rettig of Franz gave some background on the history of the debugging-api that Franz use as well as a link to the documentation for it. He suggested that perhaps "this document would be a good starting point for a common debugger api, in order to get common tools to work universally". This sounded like a good idea - unfortunately, none of the other CL implementors commented on this suggestion.
