Techniques for Working Without a Debugger [closed]

Posted by ashes999 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by ashes999
Published on 2011-06-14T15:33:34Z Indexed on 2011/06/26 8:29 UTC
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language-agnostic

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debugging

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How to effectively do manual debugging?

Programming in a debugger is ideal. When I say a debugger, I mean something that will allow you to:

Pause execution in the middle of some code (like a VM)
Inspect variable values
Optionally set variable values and call methods

Unfortunately, we're not always blessed to work in environments that have debuggers. This can be for reasons such as:

Debugger is too too too slow (Flash circa Flash 8)
Interpreted language (Ruby, PHP)
Scripting language (eg. inside RPG Maker XP)

My question is, what is an effective way to debug without a debugger? The old method of "interleave code with print statements" is time-consuming and not sufficient.

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