Re: keyboard or dbstop

[Philip Nienhuis]

Helios de Rosario wrote:
> (It was Re: showtrainprogress: invalid conversion from NaN to logical)
>
> > > > On 30/01/2014 at 23:24, Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>
> [... snip the error report of the OP, which I think is not crucial for
> my question ...]
>
> > You can safely assume that Octave doesn't complain about the if
> statement in
> > L. 304 for nothing. So the question is how to find out what is wrong
> there.
> > Well, insert a keyboard statement in empty line 302 and run your
> code.
>
> I would have set a breakpoint with
> dbstop("/home/syedk/OCT/nnet/tests/MLP/__trainlm.m", 302) instead. I
> always felt that debugging with "keyboard" is quite uncomfortable,
> because you must edit the file once and again. But I also wondered if
> there is some reason that I'm missing, why it could be more
> recommendable in some cases. Do you have such reason for recommending
> inserting the keyboard statement in this case? Or it is just a matter of
> taste?

Both.

For one, dbstop didn't always work for me (execution would just ignore 
the dbstop breakpoint); especially not with function in "private" subdirs.
(Auto-) Saving the function/script file (which I regularly do while 
debugging problems - don't you?) might also wipe breakpoints. In this 
respect your "edit file once and again" point is a bit lost on me :-)

So I use a keyboard statement as a guaranteed interruption.

Philip