[Python-Dev] PEP 553: Built-in debug()

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:39 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>> This would also avoid confusion with IPython's very
>> useful debug magic:
>>     https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/interactive/magics.html#magic-debug
>> and which might also be worth stealing for the builtin REPL.
>> (Personally I use it way more often than set_trace().)
>
> Interesting.  I’m not an IPython user.  Do you think its %debug magic would benefit from PEP 553?

Not in particular. But if you're working on making debugger entry more
discoverable/human-friendly, then providing a friendlier alias for the
pdb.pm() semantics might be useful too?

Actually, if you look at the pdb docs, the 3 ways of entering the
debugger that merit demonstrations at the top of the manual page are:

  pdb.run("...code...")  # "I want to debug this code"
  pdb.set_trace()    # "break here"
  pdb.pm()    # "wtf just happened?"

The set_trace() name is particularly opaque, but if we're talking
about adding a friendly debugger abstraction layer then I'd at least
think about whether to make it cover all three of these.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org