Re: IDE for Pascal-family language

In article <13mp96vclhp8g3b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 "Chris Burrows" <cfbsoftware@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> "Mike Sieweke" <msieweke@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
> news:msieweke-50688B.22345021122007@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> If there was something that 
> you wanted to do that the Delphi debugger was not able to do then you
truly 
> would be difficult to please.

The Delphi debugger does have most of the features I wanted,
plus some desirable features I never thought of wanting.

> However, maybe your perceived debugging requirements are based on your 
> previous coding experience - when programming in Oberon I find I rarely
need 
> to use a debugger. Looking back I realise that most of the times I had
to 
> use the Delphi debugger was because of the complexities of the unwieldy
and 
> inconsistent language that Object Pascal has become or to track down
bugs in 
> the system rather than in my code.

For a single programmer working alone, a good debugger
does more than help find the cause of a crash; it's an
extra pair of eyes during a code walk-through.  Single-
stepping through new code while watching variables is a
great way to verify that the code will do what was
intended.  A good debugger can give me a code review
nearly as well as a human.

When I was a student in a compilers class, I used Think
Pascal for the projects.  The other students used Suns
with a command-line compiler and gdb (or something like
it).  I had to ****t the parser generator to ThP and fix
a bug in it (uninitialized variable) before I could do
my own work.  After getting everything running, I had
to ****t my code back to the Sun for grading.  Despite
all the extra work, I spent half as much time on the
projects as any of my friends (~40 hours vs ~80).  I
like to consider myself a great programmer :o), but the
tool was responsible for most of the difference.

Mike

-- 
Mike Sieweke
Duluth, GA