Implementation issues II

Abstract

The panelists were asked to address three questions. The three sections below are summaries of the ideas discussed in response to each of these questions. 1. When debugging a program, what information about that program is important for presentation to the user? What techniques can the debugger use to determine such information? While helping to develop a debugger, John Johnson had observed many programmers using it, and had noticed two distinct styles of information gathering: • Many programmers began by getting fairly small amounts of information. They simply wanted an overview of the "flow" of the program, in order to get a general understanding of its behavior. • After suspicion had been narrowed down to- a particular area within the program, the users wanted as much information as possible, formatted nicely.