From: "M. Schulter" <mschulter AT value DOT net>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: no GUD from emacs in DOS...how debug?
Date: 12 Jan 1998 00:55:56 GMT
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Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> wrote:

: Btw, the Emacs interface to gdb (and other debuggers) doesn't free you
: from the need to know the gdb commands, since most of the commands
: still have to be typed as if you were working from the command line.
: Only the most frequently-used commands are mapped to Emacs keys.  The
: bulk of the interface makes sure that Emacs shows you the source
: line(s) which gdb is debugging, but it doesn't do much about the user
: interaction.

This is true, because debugging or getting state information about a C or
assembly program does indeed tend to be a complicated task, as you
discuss.

: I don't exit Emacs, I shell to DOS to debug, and then type "exit [Enter]" 
: to return to Emacs.  This is faster, especially when you have a lot of
: files loaded, since you don't lose the display setup, the history of
: the commands, etc.

Of course, as an Emacs user, I'd agree: this is one example of the
suggestion in the manual that one should usually prefer to suspend Emacs
(C-z). For a task like running command-line gdb while programming in
Emacs, I would find the idea of really exiting Emacs (C-x C-c) a
surprising one. 

Maybe some of the complications of a non-multiprocessing system like DOS
make it a bit less likely that one would remain in Emacs for an entire
computing system (easy and routine in UNIX, I've heard), but C-z does have
its uses, and I use it often.

: Well, here's my opinion.  I have never understood what's so great or
: ``convenient'' about the GUI front end in debuggers.  Is it so much
: easier to press F7 rather than s or F8 instead of n?  I don't think
: so.  And for more complicated things you have to set so many different
: parameters that the GUI doesn't help much anyway.

Interestingly enough, for a predictable and repeatable task like imaging a
PostScript program I'm writing in Emacs for viewing on screen at 200 dpi,
say, I can and have mapped the task to F7, say, using the Emacs macro and
Shell Command facilities. It works fine in text mode, and that's part of
the power of Emacs customizabilty. I just run a startup batchfile for
PostScript editing, and Emacs loads with the right Elisp file to map the
function keys as desired.

However, for debugging, I'm likely to be following a series of steps that
may be unpredictable -- the idea is to find a problem or explore a series
of state parameters. We're not sure just what questions we're going to be
asking, so a flexible text-mode interface seems to me quite logical. 

As Einstein put it, "Things should be made as simple as possible, but no
simpler." Maybe gdb illustrates the second part of that sentence.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter AT value DOT net