Per Bothner scripsit: > In that case they're not essential in the *language*. I find singularly > unpersuasive arguments that we need something in the language because > it is useful to a debugger. A useful debugger has to go beyond the > language. For example a debugger should be able to inspect function-local > and non-exported module variables.
A classical Lisp debugger is not in the general case a programmer's debugger. It notifies the user that something goes wrong and provides a variety of options for recovery, described in a high-level way (in English or another natural language, typically). To make this work, we need restarts, which is something the large language ought IMHO to have. CL: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Body/sec_9-1-4-2.html MIT: http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/mit-scheme-ref/Restarts.html Riastradh: http://mumble.net/~campbell/proposals/restart.text -- John Cowan [email protected] http://ccil.org/~cowan This great college [Trinity], of this ancient university [Cambridge], has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between. --A.E. Housman _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
