Architectural assistance to software debugging aids
Karl Schank · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1973
It has been observed [1] that 45 to 50% of programming effort is spent in debugging, checkout and testing, yet the architecture of most modern computer systems does little if anything to facilitate ease of debugging. In most batch systems the programmer is sufficiently removed from the execution of his program as to be severely handicapped in diagnosing errors. There is only so much information that can be easily obtained from a voluminous coredump, for instance. Even programmers on large timesharing systems have available at most an interactive software debugging package which operates through a combination of insertions and replacements of object code and interpretation (rather than execution) of machine code. This can get to be quite inefficient when carried to the extreme and often is useful only if the program has been processed by a special compiler.