jpm@howtek.UUCP (Jim McHale) (04/23/87)
Has anyone had expierence using Steve Jasik's "THE DEBUGGER"? It uses macnosy, and appears to be better than TMON, based on the MacTutor review.... -- Jim McHale,WA1QOS Howtek Inc decvax!howtek!jpm 21 Park Ave jpm@howtek.com Hudson, NH 03051 603-882-5200
mrh@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU (Marc Hannah) (04/24/87)
In article <496@howtek.UUCP>, jpm@howtek.UUCP (Jim McHale) writes: > Has anyone had expierence using Steve Jasik's "THE DEBUGGER"? It uses > macnosy, and appears to be better than TMON, based on the MacTutor > review.... > Jim McHale,WA1QOS Howtek Inc You should note that the MacTutor Review of 'The Debugger' was not really a review but a bit of a peek into the program. Since the article was written by Steve Jasik himself it is a bit hard to consider it a review. Nonetheless I was impressed enough by the article to purchase a copy at work just yesterday. I haven't started up the program yet but will in the next few days and will try and post comments accordingly. The biggest bad news about it so far (before inserting the disk) is that the documentation is again a 4 page handout, a la the original MacNosy documentation (in length at least). I can't yet testify about the quality of the docs OR the product, but that is what I know so far. I do know that if the program can do what his article claims then it would have saved me at least 1-2 weeks in debugging an extremely difficult problem I had a couple of months ago. David Gelphman daveg%slacvm.bitnet@forsythe.stanford.edu
palmer@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU (Bill Palmer) (04/26/87)
I bought a copy of "The Debugger" back in January. Steve has been extremely helpful in terms of bug fixes, explaining undocumented features, implementing suggestions, etc. My only exposure to TMON has been through Knaster's book, so I can't comment on the relative strengths and weakness of the two, but T.D. must surely be far ahead by now. The printed documentation is pretty skimpy. However, the program has on-line documentation (just like MacNosy) which is fairly good. Steve tells me that he is planning to get nice documentation (like the orange Nosy booklet) written up soon, but the program is still in quite a bit of flux. Stan Krute is doing the doc, so if you liked the Nosy booklet, you should like this. I've found T.D. to be invaluable in shaking out subtle bugs that would be difficult to impossible to find with MacsBug. Being able to get formatted dumps of all the Mac data structures is quite handy. The latest versions now understand Lightspeed C project files, so you don't need the Nosy pass in there if you have the project file. I've had two difficulties with the program. First, there isn't any convenient way to get it to stay there in the background until something happens - you run it and it runs the problem program after hooking itself into everything. When you shut down the problem program, you shut down T.D. This is good for those without extra memory, because it likes to grab 400K or more before it runs your program. The combination of only 1 meg of memory and no hard disk can be somewhat inconvenient to use - having more memory or a hard disk makes things much more convenient. If you have an E-Machines Big Picture display, you can have all the debugger windows on one screen and the problem program's windows on the other. I wish I had the ability to use this feature! If anyone has specific questions about the program, I'd be happy to answer them and/or pass them along to Steve. Bill Palmer whp4@csli.stanford.edu decwrl!labrea!comie couderre