HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
HP Symbolic Debugger/XL Enhancements
by Jan Merrill
Systems Technology Division
HP Symbolic Debugger/XL is a powerful, full-featured, symbolic debugger
to help you locate and correct errors in programs. The feature set
facilitates high programmer productivity and user friendliness. This
version of HP Symbolic Debugger/XL provides interactive source level
debugging for HP COBOLII/XL programs, as well as for HP C/XL, HP FORTRAN
77/XL, and HP Pascal/XL programs.
HP COBOLII/XL SUPPORT
Support for the following HP Symbolic Debugger/XL features has been
expanded to include HP COBOLII/XL programs:
* Breakpoints can be set, deleted, suspended, and activated at specific
locations allowing the user to examine the state of a program.
* Program variables can be displayed and modified.
* Single-stepping through a program or over procedures is provided at
the source statement or the equivalent assembly instruction level.
* HP Symbolic Debugger/XL provides evaluation of expressions containing
non-edited numeric variables.
* Assertions allow the execution of a list of commands before every
source statement for tracing elusive bugs.
* Multi-level stack tracing allows the user to trace program flow.
* Extensive interrogation of the debugger state, including breakpoints,
files, globals, procedures, and their variables is provided.
In addition, several new features are provided specifically for HP
COBOLII/XL programs:
* Breakpoints can be set at the first executable statement of each HP
COBOLII/XL section and paragraph.
* Trace breakpoints can be set at the first executable statement of
each HP COBOLII/XL section and paragraph.
* Stack traces of HP COBOLII/XL programs display paragraph names within
the subprograms called.
* The HP COBOLII/XL symbolic constants, SPACES and ZEROS, are provided
for initializing variables.
GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS
Two additional features have been added to enhance the ease-of-use of HP
Symbolic Debugger/XL:
* Datatrace: a variable can be automatically traced through the
program flow and can be displayed when its value changes.
Optionally, the user can specify a command list to be executed when
the variable changes.
* Command history: HP Symbolic Debugger/XL maintains a history of its
most recent commands so that users can examine or edit commands saved
in the history stack. Operation of the HP Symbolic Debugger/XL
commands DO, LISTREDO, and REDO is similar to the equivalent MPE XL
commands.
For further information, refer to the HP Symbolic Debugger/XL User's
Guide (P/N 31508-60003).