This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Debugging Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I pointed to a Python debugger post from Ted Leung this morning (here). In the comments, I was asked to post an image of a Smalltalk debugger in the middle of a sort. So, I slapped this code down in a workspace:

| items |
items := RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds first items.
items asSortedCollection: [:a :b | a title <= b title].

Then I hit the "debug it" menu option, and got the following debugger:

Now, what does that stuff mean? Well, the top pane is the stack - the reason you see "UndefinedObject>>unboundMethod in there is that I executed the code out of a workspace - in other words, the code is not attached to any particular class. Incidentally, the VW Web Toolkit uses this feature to execute SSP code on a web page. Moving on, the code pane is below the context stack, and there's a toolbar at the top (with tooltips). Below the code pane are basic inspectors - for instance variables on the left, temps and method arguments on the right. Double clicking on any of them will yield a full inspector. You can move up and down the stack, inspecting things, executing code (possibly into new debuggers), and re-compile arbitrary methods - rewinding the stack to that point. Very cool stuff - and it's why you don't tend to see Smalltalkers getting excited about "modern" debuggers in other languages with (subsets) of this capability...