Debugging woes on python

[Alexander Schmolck]

"Glenn Reed" <glenn.r at ihug.co.nz.nospam> writes:

> 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 recommend using ipython from with emacs (and typing "@pdb on" -- then any
exception will automatically land you in the debugger -- VERY VERY handy and
pretty much my default setting when I do any software or test code
development). You can also do the same from just within ipython (you loose the
automatic tracking of corresponding source in emacs). You can also just use
'plain' python's pdb, which is a bit flakey as a standalone debugger, but
useable (see the module docs).

'as