[R] step by step debugger in R?

[Robert Gentleman]

Hi,

Romain Francois wrote:
> Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 5/22/2009 10:59 AM, Michael wrote:
>>> Really I think if there is a Visual Studio strength debugger, our
>>> collective time spent in developing R code will be greatly reduced.
>>
>> If someone who knows how to write a debugger plugin for Eclipse wants
>> to help, we could have that fairly easily.  All the infrastructure is
>> there; it's the UI part that's missing.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
> [I've copied Mark Bravington and Robert Gentleman to the list as they
> are likely to have views here, and I am not sure they monitor R-help]
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Making a front-end to debugging was one of the proposed google summer of
> code for this year [1], it was not retained eventually, but I am still
> motivated.
> 
> Pretty much all infrastructure is there, and some work has been done
> __very recently__ in R's debugging internals (ability to step up). As I
> see it, the ability to call some sort of hook each time the debugger
> waits for input would make it much easier for someone to write

 I have still not come to an understanding of what this is supposed to do? When
you have the browser prompt you can call any function or code you want to. There
is no need for something special to allow you to do that.

> front-ends. A recent post of mine (patch included) [2] on R-devel
> suggested a custom prompt for browser which would do the trick, but I
> now think that a hook would be more appropriate. Without something
> similar to that, there is no way that I know of for making a front-end,
> unless maybe if you embed R ... (please let me know how I am wrong)

 I think you are wrong. I can't see why it is needed. The external debugger has
lots of options for handling debugging. It can rewrite code (see examples in
trace for how John Chambers has done this to support tracing at a location),
which is AFAIK a pretty standard approach to writing debuggers. It can figure
out where the break point is (made a bit easier by allowing it to put in pieces
of text in the call to browser).  These are things the internal debugger can't do.

> 
> There is also the debug package [3,4] which does __not__ work with R
> internals but rather works with instrumenting tricks at the R level.
> debug provides a tcl/tk front-end. It is my understanding that it does
> not work using R internals (do_browser, ...) because it was not possible
> at the time, and I believe this is still not possible today, but I might
> be wrong. I'd prefer to be wrong actually.

  I don't understand this statement. It has always been possible to work with
the internal version - but one can also take the approach of rewriting code.
There are some difficulties supporting all the operations that one would like by
rewriting code and I think a combination of external controls and the internal
debugger will get most of the functionality that anyone wants.

  There are somethings that are hard and once I have a more complete list I will
be adding this to the appropriate manual. I will also be documenting the changes
that I have been making, but that project is in flux and won't be done until the
end of August, so people who want to look at it are welcome (it is in R-devel),
but it is in development and could change pretty much without notice.
  Romain noted that we now support stepping out from one place to another
function.  We also have a debugonce flag that lets you get close to step in, but
step in is very hard in R.

  I am mostly interested in writing tools in R that can be used by anyone that
wants to write an external debugger and am not that interested in any particular
external debugger. I would be happy to listen to feature requests or issues that
arise - but the discussion should probably be on R-devel mailing list.

  best wishes
    Robert


> 
> Romain
> 
> [1] : http://www.r-project.org/soc09/ideas.html#p5
> [2] : https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-April/053128.html
> [3] : http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/debug/index.html
> [4] : http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2003-3.pdf
> 

-- 
Robert Gentleman, PhD
Program in Computational Biology
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514
PO Box 19024
Seattle, Washington 98109-1024
206-667-7700
rgentlem at fhcrc.org