[Tutor] What is a "symbolic debugger"

[Dick Moores]

At 01:13 AM 8/18/2007, Alan Gauld wrote:

>"Dick Moores" <rdm at rcblue.com> wrote
>
> > article I saw a term, "symbolic debugger", I  had been wondering
> > about for a while. Google was of little help (to me, at least), and
>
>Its a debugger that undestand symbols, in other words it can read
>the symbol table produced by a compiler/interpreter.

Ah. And that sent me to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_table>/


>Most debuggers nowadays are symbolic, but in the early days
>they weren't and you had to debug all code at the assembler/memory
>address level.
>
>If you want to have fun with that try loading a simple program into
>the DOS DEBUG command and stepping through it examining
>the memory image as you go., It is decidedly non symbolic!

Is that something I should be able to do on Win XP? Would I use debug 
<python filename> at the command line?

>Or on Linux/Unix you may be able to use adb. adb is often using
>for debugging core dumps from programs that haven't been
>compiled with the -g debug flag or have had the symbol table
>'strip'ed.
>
> > that the debugger I want to learn, WinPdb, is also a symbolic
> > debugger, but what's "symbolic" about it?
>
>Yes Python debuggers are all symbolic.
>They can understand your variable names etc so you can say
>
>break foo
>
>instead of
>
>break [0x25698567]

I'll take "break foo" any day.

Thanks very much, Alan!

Dick Moores
XP, Python 2.5, editor is Ulipad