Re: How do debuggers work?

In article 91-12-003 "Erwinus Theodorus Leonardus Omtzigt (Theo)" <omtzigt-theo@CS.YALE.EDU> writes:


>you point me in the direction of papers/books that explain how
>debuggers work.


Although it is not a "learned" text, I suggest you take a
glance at the following book:


      Ronald Mak
      Writing Compilers & Interpreters
      Wiley, 1991


This is a mass consumption book and comes with a disk of the
code. The author takes a very applied approach, dispensing
with the theory and concentrating on building software tools
which are central to the process. The tool-building approach
is what sets the book apart. Mak starts with simple scanning
tasks and works up thru various stages of gradually more
complex parsing, compiling, interpreting tasks. A summary
of the tasks taken from the preface is:


      program listing
      token recognition
      program compression
      infix/postfix conversion
      a small calculator
      syntax checker 1
      declarations analyzer
      syntax checker 2&3
      pretty printer
      interpreter
      interpretter with debugger <------------(!)
      runtime libraries
      compiler


As I said, it's a hands-on book. It jumps immediately to
coding (in C, by the way, although the language being
interpreted/compiled is Pascal).


I think it's worth a look.




--
  | David A. Hasan
  | hasan@emx.utexas.edu
--

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