I looked at the Perl debugger code some months ago with the idea that I could get ideas for a vague project of mine: I had the idea of possibly trying to use Perl and the Perl debugger to try to write a basic shell script debugger (at first, this did not seem completely crazy, I was able to use Perl to write a basic code profiler for another proprietary programming language), but I quickly gave up, it is just awful and way above and beyond my level of comprehension.
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> it is just awful and way above and beyond my level of comprehension.
Yeah it takes time! I admit that I was very frustrated at the beginning.
This code seems to have grown out of a Perl4 predecessor, the basic structure must have been designed 15-20 years ago. It depends on some obscure perlguts.
Mostly package vars, very long routines, nested flows, many AND-for-IF constructs, a bag of completely unknown features, wild package structures ( dumpValue lives in main!!! WTF ?)
At least someone took the effort to re-document it with nested PODs (which OTOH doesn't facilitate refactoring at all)
But mastering it gives a very powerful tool. And it's a key tool, we need to keep it running.
Cheers Rolf
( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)
UPDATE
still talking about v1.30, haven't looked in the newest on yet.
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