Subject: Re: Is there a debugger or similar for Common Lisp?
From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no>
Date: 1997/11/25
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3089413117481270@naggum.no>


* P. Srinivas
| I guess there is no such luck for lesser mortals like us who use
| commerical CL such as ACL :-(

why don't you give Franz, Inc, a call?  it's clear that you want to pay for
such a feature.  right?  you could at least send them a list of requests
for whatever you need to do it yourself.  (I remember that you said this is
easy to do.)

Franz ships a product called "Composer" for Allegro CL.  it's a graphical
environment with a grapher that makes profiles a lot easier to analyze, but
it also contains a windowed inspector and debugger.  I haven't used it
enough to give you a fair summary of its abilities, I'm sorry to say.  send
me some of your buggy code, and I'm might try it out.  in any case, Allegro
Composer is somewhat old by now and perhaps "clunky" by modern standards,
but it's a lot more "user-friendly" than the command-line interface or even
the Emacs interface, for at least some values of "user".  your friendly
Franz, Inc, salesperson may actually ignore your grumpy remarks and help
you if you can make a case for it.

Allegro for Windows has a lot more graphics to it than the Unix version.
unfortunately, it's also a wholly different product inside, so it's not at
all comparable.  rumors have it that their next major release will be a
_lot_ more graphical.  I'm not sure I look forward to that, but judging
from what I see here, the effect will at least be to get people to gripe
about some _other_ missing but crucial necessity.  (I hear it's also going
to use dynamic loading, so whine while you can!)  you can get a free
version of the Windows version, too.  (I assume you have the free Linux
version, or you would have had a sales or support person to talk to instead
of posting your gripes.)

(no, I'm not affiliated with Franz, Inc, and do not speak for them in any
way, but my cat receives toys from them and I get very good support with
everything I ask about.  I hate unfair remarks about people, but even more
so when they are about people I know to be good.)

#\Erik
-- 
if you think this year is "97", _you_ are not "year 2000 compliant".

see http://sourcery.naggum.no/emacs/ for GNU Emacs 20-related material.