[Gretl-devel] new function debugger

[Allin Cottrell]

On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, chris wrote:

> Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > Now that Chris is back from holiday, I'll mention this: I've
> > merged his function debugger code.
> >
> That's nice! Thank you for the cleanup!
> > It would be nice to enable this behaviour within the GUI console
> > but that's not trivial.  The code in gui2/console.c would have to
> > be re-written quite substantially to allow it to work.  I've made
> > one false start on this myself (since erased from CVS) and I need
> > to think about it more carefully before trying again.
> >
> I think for basic debugging the implementation within gretlcli is
> sufficient. The problem with supporting debugging in the gui client is
> the callback function to read user commands. I had two ideas about this,
> which would put this problem into a wider context:
>
> 1. We could add a new function to enable scripts to interact with the
> user. A new function, let's say readinput, could read input from the
> console. This way the user could alter the execution flow while the
> script is running. If we had this facility in place we could use it for
> the debugger, too.
> 2. Perhaps debugging via a console prompt is not sufficient for
> gretl_gui users. Perhaps we could open a second instance of the gretl
> main window when a function is debugged. Within this window one could
> see all series, matrices, etc defined in this function. This way users
> would debug function using the same guithey use for normal operations.

These ideas sound good.  I now have a basic version of debugging
in the gui console in a semi-usable state; it needs some fixes but
the proof of concept is there.  I needed a second debugging
callback function to flush output in the GUI case.

Allin.