31–40 of 162 posts
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I was pretty sure that it was for configuring network devices.
Actually, I think we are both right. http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...
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A big problem with visual debuggers is that they are too blunt of an instrument. Often I wish to examine specific things under specific conditions and thus use conditionals to narrow down what's being explored instead of bajillion breakpoints and/or log records. Debuggers could add conditional expressions, but then they'd be re-inventing WRITE statements anyhow. As far as the nearby statement that maybe I didn't lear…
> Debuggers could add conditional expressions, but then they'd be re-inventing WRITE statements anyhow. SWI-Prolog's debugger can be invoked conditionally whenever you want from inside your running application. I've used it many times, and the code is simply: (Condition -> gtrace ; true) It's true that you could stick a write there, but you would have to think about what pieces of data you will need. Your mileage may…
Re: "in Prolog you cannot nest loops...It's hard to write a big non-dissected piece of code if you cannot nest loops." -- But nesting is good for modularity. It's sometimes called "step-wise refinement", which is a brilliant abstraction that is usually easy and natural to comprehend. Nesting is how we have been splitting up society since the dawn of civilization: countries, states, counties, cities, etc. (or equiv.) Similar for big militaries. (Maybe this is a meta form of Conway's law? Either way Conway was on to something.)
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I am curious if you used a visual debugger for prolog? (or for a procedural language) printing things to the console is the poor man debugger.
A big problem with visual debuggers is that they are too blunt of an instrument. Often I wish to examine specific things under specific conditions and thus use conditionals to narrow down what's being explored instead of bajillion breakpoints and/or log records. Debuggers could add conditional expressions, but then they'd be re-inventing WRITE statements anyhow. As far as the nearby statement that maybe I didn't lear…
Here is my crowning achievement from back then in 1993 - a genetic programming simulator that evolved ants to follow pheromone trails in pure prolog.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/areas/genetic/gp/systems/gp_...
Enjoy.
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A big problem with visual debuggers is that they are too blunt of an instrument. Often I wish to examine specific things under specific conditions and thus use conditionals to narrow down what's being explored instead of bajillion breakpoints and/or log records. Debuggers could add conditional expressions, but then they'd be re-inventing WRITE statements anyhow. As far as the nearby statement that maybe I didn't lear…
Your Console.log will not help you in a recursive function
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I am curious if you used a visual debugger for prolog? (or for a procedural language) printing things to the console is the poor man debugger.
> printing things to the console is the poor man debugger. You may want to try working with network before making this statement, when you cannot step through a function because of timeouts. Or maybe even looking at tracing debuggers, like strace, ltrace, or Erlang's gdb, which all do little more than "printing things to the console". Logging (and logging-like tools) is a very important way of debugging services, you…
I use logging to log problems that would happen on a user machine or server where I can't open the debugger and see it. When an error happens on a server or a customer machine and I can't use the debugger I have to guess the problematic section and put lots of logging and try to reproduce, then add more logging and so on until I find the problem.
Debugger are much better but I notice my other colleagues do not use them and prefer the console.log or similar
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I've shared this with anyone who will let me divert the conversation to Prolog. At work we have the Haskell folks, the Lispers who move everything towards Lisp, and I'm the one who moves every conversion towards Prolog, then I send the link to this. :-D
Where do you work? Sounds neat!!
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Let's face it, procedural is just plain easier to debug because you can more easily split it into digestible and dissect-able chunks: divide-and-conquer. Perhaps functional and logical CAN readily have such features, but nobody either figured how, or have not figured out how to explain how to do dissection to normal people. (This is sometimes a criticism of SQL also, but the added WITH clause helps break up big queri…
No idea why you think functional programming can't do printf debugging. Even pure languages like Haskell have `unsafePerformIO` (or wrappers like https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.11.1.0/docs/Debug... ). Also functional programming heavily encourages splitting up code into digestible chunks (they're called functions ;) )
One of my favorite languages, pity that is has had even harder time than Lisp getting mainstream acceptance.
Let's face it, procedural is just plain easier to debug because you can more easily split it into digestible and dissect-able chunks: divide-and-conquer. Perhaps functional and logical CAN readily have such features, but nobody either figured how, or have not figured out how to explain how to do dissection to normal people. (This is sometimes a criticism of SQL also, but the added WITH clause helps break up big queri…
Incidentally, my impression has been that the use of a declarative (or pure functional) language leads to spending drastically less (if any at all) time debugging. If your code makes sense (to you), it will work. Or, as an old adage goes, "If it compiles, it works."