[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #38953] Feature request: improvements to command line debugger

[anonymous]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?38953>

                 Summary: Feature request: improvements to command line
debugger
                 Project: GNU Octave
            Submitted by: None
            Submitted on: Thu 09 May 2013 04:51:40 PM UTC
                Category: Interpreter
                Severity: 3 - Normal
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Feature Request
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: Charles Fox
        Originator Email: address@hidden
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 3.2.0
        Operating System: GNU/Linux

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Details:

I'm stepping through someone else's code to try to understand what it's doing.
   In Matlab-like environments this is easy, the keys F9-F11 give step
commands, and the current position and stack is displayed in the GUI.   Doing
this in Octave is clunkier, I have do keep typing dbwhere to get the line
number, reading it manually, and re-typing it into the list command to see the
code.  (And even then it doesn't show the current line).

I would like to suggest a command line debugger feature similar to gdb where
the user can type a single letter 'l' (for list) and have the interpreter show
the 10 lines around the current line, with an arrow marking the current line. 
  (It could also allow "l 20" to specify how many lines to print).   This
would only take a few minutes to implement but would speed up my code reading
by a factor of 10s or probably 100s.

(A more heavyweight solution would be to have the debugger expose its own
internals as an octave struct, like in the python pdb debugger.   Then the
user could write her own functions like
   function mydblist()
      currentline = theDebugger.lineNo
      currentfunctionfile = theDebugger.currentFunctionFile
      %read and print lines from file
this would probably be a much bigger job to implement but would allow
different users to write all kinds of useful debug macros and share them.)

I could maybe have a go at a patch for the lightweight version myself if one
of the octave devs could give me a few pointers about where to look in the
code?  (I wrote some similar mods for the python debugger, but it's code is
probably a lot easier to read than octave's.)




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