Do any debuggers support "edit and continue?"

John Nagle nagle at animats.com
Wed May 12 17:18:53 EDT 2010


Joel Koltner wrote:
> Just curious... in Microsoft's Visual Studio (and I would presume some 
> other tools), for many languages (both interpreted and compiled!) 
> there's an "edit and conitnue" option that, when you hit a breakpoint, 
> allows you to modify a line of code before it's actually executed.
> 
> Does any Python debugger support this feature?  Being an interpreted 
> language it doesn't seem like it would necessarily be too onerous to 
> support?  It'd be quite handy in that, especially if you hit a 
> breakpoint due to the interpreter throwing an error, you could fix just 
> the line in question and keep going, rather than having to stop the 
> entire program, fix the line, and then run again and potentially kill a 
> bunch of time getting the program back into the same "state."

    Having actually used LISP systems with "edit and continue", it's a good
thing that Python doesn't have it.  It encourages a "patch" mentality, and
the resulting code is usually disappointing.

    What the original poster seems to need is a global analysis
tool that insures that all names used are defined.  Like "pylint".

					John Nagle



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