POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Java: Some things never change : Re: Java: Some things never change Server Time
29 Jul 2024 12:22:24 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Java: Some things never change  
From: Orchid Win7 v1
Date: 8 Apr 2012 04:53:19
Message: <4f8151ff$1@news.povray.org>
>> I'm single-stepping through the code, and half the time the local
>> variables window doesn't even remotely correspond to the code I'm
>> actually looking at. I step over a line that says id++, and the id field
>> remains stubbornly fixed at its previous value. Even though I just
>> god-damn /watched/ the increment instruction execute! WTF?!

> Often a result of the "id" being tracked having been from "someplace
> else", like a different function, and thus the "local" copy is changing,
> or the copy within *this instance of the function call*, but not the one
> that is actually being tracked (which was the last time it was called,
> or from a different function or... who the hell knows). Basically,
> tracking is context insensitive, so you are not tracking which ever
> version of the variable you are currently stepping through, as expected,
> you are tracking one from a different context.

Thing is, most of the time when you jump to another function, the local 
variables display updates to reflect that you're now in a different 
scope. But, about 30% of the time, /it doesn't update/. So you're now 
looking at a completely irrelevant bunch of data while single-stepping 
your code.

I haven't seen any other debugger fail in this way. I've seen debuggers 
where you can't /see/ all the local variables, only the once you've 
configured to "watch". But I haven't seen a debugger where the watched 
variables don't actually frigging update at random. I can only imagine 
it's a bug. A bug... in the debugger. Now that's meta.


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