Debugging woes on python

[John Roth]

"Glenn Reed" <glenn.r at ihug.co.nz.nospam> wrote in message
news:bmdq3l$d8d$1 at lust.ihug.co.nz...
> This is just a general comment after trying my hand at some serious python
> programming for the first time.  Have played with it for some time but
this
> is the first serious thing I've done with it.  (By serious I mean 650
lines
> of python code written for a client).
>
> The version of Python is the ActiveState version for Windows which
included
> PythonWin IDE.
>
> Prior to that I learn't Perl and used it for sometime.  What I miss with
> python is the lack of a straightforward command line debugger.  That is
> setting breakpoints and going step, step, step thru my code and examining
> variables as appropriate.  While I enjoyed Python's better syntax I found
> Python's debugger frustrating and basically found it unusable.  I could
set
> breakpoints by using PythonWin but I couldn't step thru the code.  The
worst
> thing was that I couldn't list the source code or see any visual
recognition
> of stepping thru source code.   The debugger was Python's pdb module.  Is
> there anything better for python?  It didn't take me this long to get
> started with Perl's command line (non-GUI) debugger.

I suspect that part of the reason is simply that a lot of us have gotten
bitten by the Test Driven Development bug, and found that debuggers
are simply unnecessary if we have pervasive executable programmer
tests.

The other part of the reason is that Python is largely a volunteer effort.
There's no intrinsic reason why it couldn't grow a command line
debugger, but it's something that someone is going to have to want
enough to write, debug and convince the core developers group to
include in the distribution.

If you want to start on this effort, I'd suggest looking at the
debugging interface in IDLE, since it has to deal with cross-process
issues.

John Roth


>
> Thanks in advance
> Glenn.
>
>