[Python-Dev] PEP 553: Built-in debug() (original) (raw)

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Wed Sep 6 13:00:23 EDT 2017

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:39 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote: This would also avoid confusion with IPython's very useful debug magic: https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/interactive/magics.html#magic-debug and which might also be worth stealing for the builtin REPL. (Personally I use it way more often than settrace().) Interesting. I’m not an IPython user. Do you think its %debug magic would benefit from PEP 553?

Not in particular. But if you're working on making debugger entry more discoverable/human-friendly, then providing a friendlier alias for the pdb.pm() semantics might be useful too?

Actually, if you look at the pdb docs, the 3 ways of entering the debugger that merit demonstrations at the top of the manual page are:

pdb.run("...code...") # "I want to debug this code" pdb.set_trace() # "break here" pdb.pm() # "wtf just happened?"

The set_trace() name is particularly opaque, but if we're talking about adding a friendly debugger abstraction layer then I'd at least think about whether to make it cover all three of these.

-n

-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org

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