Implementation issues II
Michael S. Kenniston, Russ Atkinson · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1983
The panelists were asked to address three questions. The three sections below are summaries of the ideas discussed in response to each of these questions. 1. When debugging a program, what information about that program is important for presentation to the user? What techniques can the debugger use to determine such information? While helping to develop a debugger, John Johnson had observed many programmers using it, and had noticed two distinct styles of information gathering: • Many programmers began by getting fairly small amounts of information. They simply wanted an overview of the "flow" of the program, in order to get a general understanding of its behavior. • After suspicion had been narrowed down to- a particular area within the program, the users wanted as much information as possible, formatted nicely.