I've seen this in a lot of IDEs (even in the most popular and heavily used ones, like Visual Studio): if you want to watch a variable's value, you have to manually type its name in the Watches section of the debugger. Why can't there just be a list of all of them with checkboxes next to them ?

The developer can then just check the box next to the one he wants to watch and that's it. Variables with identical names can probably be numbered in some way (for example a, b, x(1), x(2), c, etc.

I've seen some exceptions to this (NetBeans or BlueJ), but there are exceptions to everything, right ?

Maybe it's a stupid question, maybe not, but I've always wondered why this is so.