Debug ops?

[Dan Sugalski]

I'm considering adding in some new ops and a command-line switch to 
help debug parrot code, but before I did I figured I'd better throw 
it out to the list for some debugging. (This seems like something 
which could be of good general use, and as such I'd like to hash it 
out, do it once, and do it right)

As I've been writing library code in pir, I'm finding I've got a 
*lot* of commented-out printerr sections, as well as a fair amount of 
intermediate code to generate the data to be printed. What would be 
useful would be a relatively fast and simple way to leave these in 
and just skip over them, or have them not execute. As such I'm 
thinking we could use:

 dprinterr [PISN]x - Like printerr, but only when running in debug mode
 ifdebug label - If debug's on, branch to label
 unlessdebug label - branch to label unless debugging's on
 debugbsr label - do a bsr to the label if debugging's on
As well as making the current debug status part of the interpreter 
info section which can be queried and branched on as needed. I can 
certainly see skipping the if/unlessdebug stuff, though the print 
only if debugging would make the code a lot cleaner, such as it is. 
(I'm also thinking that a conditional bsr would be useful, but I'm 
not sure it'd be useful *enough*) If it'd make the JIT unhappy to 
have more branching ops they can be left out.
--
				Dan

--------------------------------------it's like this-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk