Re: Hacking Debugger bugs connected to $^D

[Tommy]

Okay Rolf. pdb repl?! You have just officially attained a new level of awesomeness! I can't help you with this problem but let me be the first to say, you are a-ma-zing. That is all.

[LanX]

I'm flattered ... and I don't think I deserve this ... but thanks! :)

And many merits belong to pemungkah's help in Re^5: [perldebugger] calling perldoc from within the debugger (inifile).

Old thread I know, but understanding and patching the code of perl5db.pl takes some time. =)

[Laurent_R]

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.

[LanX]

> 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.

UPDATE

still talking about v1.30, haven't looked in the newest on yet.