Interactive debug window

[Blake McBride]

Greetings,

I am new to this group and this library.  I couldn't easily find an answer to a question I had so I am posting the question to this group.  I hope that is okay.

I used a language called Interlisp many years ago.  It had a trace facility and what it called a break facility.  As I got into it I discovered that the language compiler and interpreter had no facilities for these features.  They were simply something you linked with and used.  It was written in the language itself and didn't require any low level support.

Years later I was using the scheme language.  I needed a debugger even though the scheme facility didn't have any support for such a thing.  I was able to write an entire trace & break package that worked very well.

This leads me to Flex / ActionScript.  I am wondering if your library, or any other you know of, supports this functionality.  I will describe the functionality as follows:

The library, written in vanilla actionscript has a function called uibreak()  (for example).  uibreak() is inserted into the source code of an application at any points where you would like to debug the application.  uibreak() is a synchronous call.  uibreak() causes a popup window to appear on the screen.  uibreak() is passed a string argument that appears at the top border of the popup window.  This way you know where the window came from.

The popup window has two text boxes.  The top one is large and expands as you expand the popup window.  The bottom textbox is at the bottom and high enough for a line or two.

You type commands in the bottom window.  The uibreak() facility copies your query to the top textbox, evaluates it, and puts the result on the top textbox.  So, for example, if you wanted to know the value of a variable, you can type the name of the variable and you will see its value.

There are two ways to exit the facility, like "quit" and "exit".  One destroys the popup window and continues the program, the other leaves the popup window on the screen leaving it non-functional.

The facility also includes a function called uitrace().  uitrace() causes a single trace popup window to appear if it hasn't already done so.  It then displays the arguments to the uitrace() function on the popup window and continue.  uitrace() can be placed in any number of locations in the program.  All will use that single trace window to display its arguments.  This allows one to follow the flow of the running program displaying various values as it proceeds.

I am wondering if anything like this exists already.  I wouldn't want to waste a bunch of time to reinvent it.  Use of this would largely render the flash debugger unnecessary in my opinion.  I would be able to debug easily.

Thanks for the input.

Blake