shelley@atc.sps.mot.com (Norman K. Shelley) (01/25/90)
New Desired Feature(s) Beyond Eiffel 2.2B (24Jan90)
Major Desire:
Improve the ability to debug a large system without having to resort
to print statements.
Assumptions:
1.) The Eiffel debugger is nearly useless.
2.) Failures in real/large systems are hard to recreate on demand.
3.) The runtime system stores source line numbers.
Givens:
1.) The runtime system stores the valid values for each inspect statement
as well as the current value.
2.) The runtime system stores the values of variables used in expressions.
Desired Features:
1.) When an inspect statement fails on a bad value the bad value should be
printed out along with the current bad inspect value failure message.
2.) When an assertion fails the values and variable names and function names
and function values of the expression that caused the failure should be printed
out along with the current assertion failure message.
3.) When any failure occurs the line number in the source should be printed
out with the current failure message.
One Supporting Example (many others are possible):
If more than one inspect statement exists in a routine it becomes a guessing
game as to which inspect statement really failed.
4.) Assertion labels should be strings so that spaces, uppercase, and lowercase
could be supported. This would allow for more readable failure messages.
Norman Shelley
Motorola - ATC
2200 W. Broadway M350
Mesa, AZ 85202
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shelley@atc.sps.mot.com
(602) 962-2473