sdb: the debugger from hell...

[brownrigg at kuhub.cc.ukans.edu]

Summary:  "...and I thought SADE was a P.P.E. (1) for a debugger..."


Where does sdb come from?  My first and only experience with it is with
A/UX.  I've never seen it on any other Unix-box I've encountered (I'm not
a Unix god, and have personally experienced only 4 vendors' implementations).

But if I may:  I'd suggest a more appropriate name would be "msdb" - 
Marginal Symbolic DeBugger.  Its bad enough that the thing knows fairly 
little about the 3G-language one might be using (as if under Unix there
were a plethoria of choices):  it knows nothing of typecasts;  doesn't
understand "*myPtr"; can't trap conditionally (that I've found); ...

But by far, the worst offense has got to be a debugger that pumpkinates
trying to display the contents of memory:  sdb dies brutally if it tries
to display a location as float/double which is not in valid form (e.g. NAN).

Am I full of sh*t here?  I'd like some feedback folks-in-the-know.  Personally,
1)  if I could garrantee valid contents of memory locations I wanted to 
display, I sure wouldn't need a debugger...  2) since CTRL-D is overloaded
in the sense it displays the "next block of" either source text, OR memory
locations, depending upon context, I'm constantly being nailed by intending
to display the next 10 lines of code, after having displayed some memory
contents, only to have the next <= 10 memory locations displayed and 
invariably one of them "ain't kosher floating point". Ka-boom!  (doctor
says if doing that hurts - stop doing that - thanks doc, you're a lot of 
help).

So what's the "community" have to say about my ramblings?

Rick Brownrigg
Kansas Geological Survey

(1) P.P.E.:  Piss-Poor Excuse.