On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> Thanks much for putting this together. I do appreciate it.
You are most welcome. I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to
updating it (though I'm hoping there will be a little more feedback,
particularly concerning the new suggestions).
> At this stage, it might be better to go through and pull out the concepts
> and capabilities we need, rather than get into the details of user
> interface. Knowing, for example, that we need to provide help is more
> important at this stage than knowing that the 'h' key provides it. (The
> details arguably obscure things a bit more than we'd like at the moment)
Agreed...which is why I didn't include user-interface for any of
the new suggestions. The only elements that have a command key assigned
are the ones in the "Existing functionality" section--and that section is
basically just a cut'n'paste of the output from the 'h' command in the
present debugger.
The fact that both you and Jarkko pointed this out raises a good
question though...do we want to break backwards compatibility by, for
example, reassigning some of the command keys to other commands, or
deleting some of the less-used commands or variables? The pros and cons
are fairly obvious, but how do people feel?
> Also, don't be constrained to command-line interfaces. I, for one, much
> prefer GUI debuggers to command-line ones. If I have a 21" monitor handy
> I'd as soon open up a dozen different windows monitoring a dozen different
> things than be constrained to what'll fit into a terminal window, no matter
> how big it might be. (Not, mind, that I'm proposing perl ship with a set of
> graphic tools)
This is one of the issues that got ellided off the bottom because
I felt that it was taking too long to get a first draft out. My
preference would be that we ship the debugger with the following
capabilities:
- command line interface (can run anywhere)
- windowing system a la Emacs (ability to create, subdivide, and
resize multiple views inside the window
- hooks so that a full-bore GUI can easily wrap itself around the
debugger engine
Dave
