[Haskell-cafe] Re[2]: Why Haskell?

[Matthew Bromberg]

What's different about this kind of console debugger is that you have 
the power of the entire language at your disposal via the interpreter
at a given breakpoint.  This is a bit more powerful than typical 
debugging capabilities.
It goes beyond just inspecting the values of variables, one can actually 
execute commands and process data
at any given point of the program with the full context of the program 
at the breakpoint.  That's pretty powerful and is often used in 
scripting languages
and is probably one of the reasons why Matlab is so incredibly 
productive for science and engineering problems.
Yes it's nice to have a graphical link to the source, but given a choice 
I'd take the GHCi breakpoint capability over the visual link to source code.

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Simon,
>
> Monday, July 24, 2006, 2:53:21 PM, you wrote:
>
>   
>>> is this will be really usable without gui support? your project is
>>>       
>
>   
>> I think this work is important because it gives everyone access to debugging
>> facilities with the minimum of hassle.  If you're already using GHCi, then you
>> can set breakpoints - with no side conditions, no extra packages to install, no
>>     
>
> i don't have any gdb experience and wonder whether console debugger
> (without GUI to browse sources debugged) may be useful in real life.
> integration of debugger with visual haskell or eclipse will, imho,
> bring Haskell to the next level of usefulness - when it can be used by
> average application programmers, who are need RAD tools to develop and
> debug their code
>
>
>