[wingide-users] Incremental development

[Wingware Support]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 konrad.hinsen at laposte.net wrote:
>> 2) The Debug Probe (Wing Pro only), where you can run to a breakpoint or
>>    exception in your debug process and then execute code in the context
>>    of your currently selected stack frame.  This is useful together with
>>    conditional breakpoints to get to the particular case/state for which
>>    you're trying to write some code.
>
> I love the debug probe, that's one of the best features of WingIDE. But it's 
> convenient for short one-liners only. What I would like to be able to do is
> 1) Analyse a bug in the debug probe.
> 2) Fix the bug in my code, i.e. usually in one or two classes contained in my 
> script.
> 3) Resubmit the fixed code to the interpreter.
> 4) Re-run the test code.
>
> All that without having to start over in a new debug process.
>
> If my understanding of the debug probe is correct, all that I would need is a 
> command that sends the selection for evaluation to the debug probe. 
> Copy/paste won't do the trick due to the different handling of indented 
> blocks in interactive mode.

We are looking at supporting module / fragment reload as a debugger 
feature.  It's not quite so simple as just sending code to evaluate. For 
example, think about existing instances that reference a bound code object 
for their methods -- replacing one of those won't just automatically happen 
if you just re-evaluate a changed class.  There are, however, ways to do 
this internally.

> Could this perhaps be done with scripting?

Not really, for the above-described reason.  You can of course re-evaluate 
function defs and classes and that will work reasonably for new invocations 
or newly created instances.  I do this by dragging an dropping the function 
def from the source into the debug probe.  It adjusts leading indent and 
should evaluate automatically.

- Stephan