GHCi debugger status

[Isaac Dupree]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> Claus Reinke wrote:
>> Then how about my suggestion for selectively adding lexical scope to
>> breakpoints? I'd like to be able to say
>>
>>    :break <loc/name> {names}
>>
>> and have GHCi make the necessary changes to keep {names} available
>> for inspection when it hits that breakpoint. 
> 
> The only easy way to do that is to recompile the module that contains 
> the breakpoint.  To do it without recompiling is about as hard as doing 
> what I suggested above, because it involves a similar mechanism (being 
> able to selectively retain the values of free variables).

sure, but GHCi recompiling the module maybe takes less than 
a second, whereas going and modifying the source-code in an 
editor takes orders of magnitude more time!  Is there 
something fundamentally wrong with recompiling an 
interpreted module?

-Isaac