Re: Stack traces

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Hello,
>
> Cecil McGregor <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> My first problem lies in the lack of a decent debugger.
>> (I can hear the screams of more enlightened Guilers
>> already!) The stack traces seldom provide filenames
>> and line numbers to hint where a problem might hide.
>> While I've read advice to allow the appearance of
>> filenames/line numbers, I still can't seem to
>> consistently find these in a stack trace.
>>
>> I would really like the filename/line number to appear
>> in a stack trace with the actual source code and not
>> some partially opaque macro expansion.
>
> Could you mock up the stack trace as you would like to see it displayed?
>
> I think it would be helpful because what you write here is a common
> complaint, but it’s also something that seasoned Guilers no longer
> realize because they’re used to it.  So a fresh eye on what it should
> look like is great.
>
> There are also deeper technical issues, such as tail calls, but we can
> put them aside for now.
>
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.

One thing that we see requested a lot is how to do the equivalent of:

  import pdb
  pdb.set_trace()

in python, just dumping something to "trigger" the debugger somewhere.
I seem to remember getting some arcane code to do something similar, but
maybe we can just have a simple invocation that people could put
anywhere.  (Amirouche has been raising this one also I think.)