Yikes ! There's a bug... Who should you call ?

If you have a bug, you'll probably called up the native clipper debugger ie unless you're using CA-Clipper 5.3. In which case... good luck ! As for me, I have written tons of vertical apps and have yet to come accross bugs which I could't fix ! The primitive tool I use for watch points is the good old ALERT() and clipper's native function call traces.

Recently, I have been in touch with Dave Pearson, one of my nominated personalities on comp.lang.clipper who advised me about the usefulness of MrDebug. Here's Dave's opinion on MrDebug ...

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But why should I use a debugger ?... the good old ALERT() as a watch point is good enough for me ?

Well, back in the days when only CLD was available that is what I used to do as well. As it is, MrDebug is far more than a debugger. For example, think about the DGROUP stuff we are talking about right now, with MrDebug, if you want to know how your DGROUP is been used you just open the memory window and have a look at the DGROUP map.

Then there is the assert/trace system which is very handy, but then I'm bound to say that because that one was my suggestion. :-)

Also, if you code uses lots of OOPS and lots of links between objects MrDebug is very handy because it understands Class(y) and displays a proper eval stack, showing method names and the like. Also, the DBF screen is more like DBU than the old system found in CLD. You can do lots of handy non-debugging stuff in the MrDebug DBF viewing window.

Then there is the profiler for finding bottlenecks in your time critical code....

Also, in the next version there is the printer output window. This is very handy because you can check your printouts without the need to print either to a printer or to a file. Very handy.

Anyway, that's plenty of waffle from me about MrDebug. :-)