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Postings from December 2016
On 13 Dec 2016, at 02:32, Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> wrote: > * Sam Kington <sam@illuminated.co.uk> [2016-12-03T09:45:56] >> This is curiosity rather than anything else, but: why is the debugger using >> single quotes here? > > I could well be wrong, but my guess would be: because dumpvar.pl is kind of a > mess. I would hope that we'd be open to improving it iteratively over time, > and not take its existing formatting as set in stone. > > (The dumper to be used by perl5db.pl is actually configurable, but this doesn't > appear to be documented, and it might not really work as such.) OTTOYH (or indeed anybody’s H), what’s wrong with dumpvar.pl / perl5db.pl in general, and in particular? I’ve been vaguely thinking about giving back to the community via hacking on core; I’m not a C programmer and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the internals, but something in pure-Perl I can cope with. Having just thought about it for almost literally just a minute or two, but remembering my frustrations with the debugger over the years, my personal list would include: (1) Watch expressions and lexical variables not playing well together. If you’re in a loop and you set a watch expression on a lexical variable that’s currently set, the watch expression will fire as soon as the code enters e.g. a subroutine or method elsewhere, as that variable will now be undef. But that’s not helpful and makes watch expressions useless. (2) Dumping of e.g. huge DBIx::Class objects being an absolute pain. Those things are absolutely massive and if you dump a data structure without thinking “wait, hang on, that might contain a DBIx::Class object of some kind”, you may end up with screenfuls of unhelpful noise, killing your scrollback. Is there a canonical list somewhere, e.g. a RT queue or something? Other than the general “It would be nice to clear up XXX comments” in the documentation? Sam -- Website: http://www.illuminated.co.uk/Thread Previous | Thread Next