On Fri, 21 May 2004, Bas Scheffers wrote: > Then they shouldn't be writing those bugs in the first place! ;-)
Sorry but this is complete nonsense and often said by people who never used a good debugger. > I have never used any debugging tools other than "puts" or > System.out.println(), never needed it. But then again, I haven't done any > C programming either... "puts" can be used as a debugger. However it completely falls short of the power a good debugging environment can provide. You know, besides using AOLserver I'm a developer of the Free Pascal compiler. A compiler is definately way too complicated to be debugged with "writeln", as it's called in Pascal. So we use gdb. Now I can tell you, gdb is powerfull enough to be able to debug the compiler, but we're currently in no way as effective in debugging the compiler as we did a few years ago. Reason? A few years ago Free Pascal could still be compiled by Borland Pascal and we were able to debug it with Turbo Debugger. I can assure you, we lost *a* *lot* productivity by having to switch to gdb. And I can't even think about how to debug the compiler with writeln. Imagine a memory corruption bug that occurs halfway when the compiler is compiling itself. You'll have no idea when the memory was corrupted, you only know when the memory is accessed and contains wrong values. Go searching without a debugger :) > Come to think of it, I never see anyone in our company use a debugger for > Java and I can assure you we write very reliable software! This is because a debugger does not make you find more bugs. It only helps you to understand them more quickly. Daniël -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
