[Idle-dev] stack viewer vs. debugger

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/20/2015 9:53 AM, Mark Roseman wrote:
> 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>

Rearranging your post ...

 > If it’s just because they were two independent hacks, that’s fine.

Let us take that as the historical reason and leave it at that.

 > But is there any reason they couldn’t (shouldn’t) be unified as
 > far as the user is concerned?

Based on my newly acquired knowledge of StackViewer and a careful 
comparison with Debugger UI, I believe they can be unified and therefore 
should be unified, using the 'best' features of each.

 > And I get that there may be two different underlying mechanisms that
 > they use to extract the data from the program state or exception.

The new UI would need a new mode attribute to take care of this.  The 
mode would also determine title and whether the debugger control panel 
is displayed.

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

Stackviewer allows users to see multiple globals and locals, debugger 
one of each.  As explained on the stackviewer issue, I think the merged 
UI should display one globals and possible many locals. The values 
corresponding to names should be displayed the way debugger does it. I 
said more on the stackviewer issue.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy