[Idle-dev] stack viewer vs. debugger

[Mark Roseman]

On Aug 19, 2015, at 11:57 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 8/19/2015 9:35 PM, Mark Roseman wrote:
>> Innocent question… why are the ‘stack viewer’ and the ‘debugger’ two different things?
> 
> What sort of answer do you want?  Because they do different things? Because they are two different (and incomplete) experiments?
> 
> I think the stackviewer will actually be useful once simplified by removing noise.
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue24790>


They both show a stack trace. They both let you look at locals and globals at each stack frame.

Yet they’re different windows, with different user interfaces. I’d like to know if there’s a reason that if you get an exception it wouldn’t just show up in the debugger window instead of what it does now. It doesn’t make sense to me and I don’t recall seeing anything similar elsewhere. 

If it’s just because they were two independent hacks, that’s fine. And I get that there may be two different underlying mechanisms that they use to extract the data from the program state or exception. But is there any reason they couldn’t (shouldn’t) be unified as far as the user is concerned?

Mark