During web searching, I found the following comment : Traditional Lisp debugging practices can still be used.
- What are the traditional debugging practices?
- Normally, what tools are used for debugging lisp (with/without emacs)?
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5@rlb.usa I dont know what constitues a "toy language", but Lisp has been used in several logistics planning systems by the US Army, been deployed to spacecraft control (and even remotely debugged), in several AI and AI-related systems, and behind ITA Software, the search enginge for cheap flights, just bought by google for $700M.user110763– user1107632010-07-15 22:21:33 +00:00Commented Jul 15, 2010 at 22:21
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SLIME is an awesome development environment for CL that runs on Emacs. I never use any other REPL for CL.Jyaan– Jyaan2010-07-26 06:54:22 +00:00Commented Jul 26, 2010 at 6:54
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5 Answers
I don't know what Bill meant specifically, but IME:
Typically your editor will have a running instance connected to it. You can compile functions immediately to insert them into the running image -- since Lisp has its own compiler, you're just telling the running image to read and compile a small section of text. Or you can run functions directly, to see what they do.
When an exception is thrown (or a condition is signaled, if you're lucky enough to be in a dialect with conditions), the debugger will show you the stack trace and let you decide how to continue.
The major difference between Lisp and other high-level compiled languages is that in Lisp you're basically always writing code with the debugger attached.
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As clojure was tagged in the question, I'll give our perspective.
Class files generated by the clojure compiler include line- and method-based debugging info, so any java debugger will interoperate directly with clojure code, including breakpoints and object inspection.
If you use emacs/slime as your development environment, integration with slime's debugger has recently been included. As documentation is a little sparse, it's probably best to check out the scope of the support on github directly.
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Run edebug-defun in emacs and you will see that lisp is magic.
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In something that I would call approaches a "traditional set of Lisp debugging techniques" are:
- Debug printouts
- Function tracing (each invocation of a traced function is printed with an indentation that corresponds to call depth, on return the return value is printed).
- Explicit invocation of the in-image debugger
- Ending up in the in-image debugger due to a bug (trying to add an integer and a symbol, for example)
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Basically just things like adding code to print out values as it runs so you can see what's happening.
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Flinkman
Sounds lika a C# programmer.. (it's a compliment)