Debugging

[John W. Eaton]

On 15-Oct-2009, OCuanachain, Oisin (Oisin) wrote:

| I am in the process of porting a large Matlab code base to Octave. I thought 
the debugging functions would help resolve any syntax incompatabilities but 
they seem to be less useful than I had hoped. Basically I'm looking for the 
same functionality as the:
| dbstop
| dbstep
| dbquit functions in Matlab.
| 
| dbstop seems to work in Octave, however there is no dbstep.
| The doc for dbstop says
| *See also:* dbclear, dbstatus, dbnext.
| however doc dbnext returns no result.
| The following link: 
http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?action=browse&diff=1&id=MatlabOctaveCompatibility
| suggests that dbnext does in fact exist and is the equivalent of dbstep in 
Matlab however there is no mention of dbnext in the function reference:
| http://octave.sourceforge.net/doc/D.html#D
| Anyway trying dbnext it does indeed seem to work as dbstep however when I try 
to view the state of my variables after stopping at a breakpoint (via whos 
-variables) the output shows only __nargin__:
| 
| *** local user variables:
| 
|   Prot Name            Size                     Bytes  Class
|   ==== ====            ====                     =====  =====
|    rw- __nargin__      1x1                          8  double
| 
| Total is 1 element using 8 bytes
| 
| So, my questions are:
| 1. Is http://octave.sourceforge.net/doc/D.html#D the most up to date funtion 
reference ? If so, why no mention of dbnext ? Someone would hardly go to the 
trouble of writing this fuction but then not document it ?
| 2. Should I be able to see all  the variables in the current funtion when I 
stop at a breakpoint ? If not, then what is the point of breakpoints ?
| 
| For reference I am running release: GNU Octave, version 3.0.5, on Red Hat 
Linux.

The latest stable release, 3.2.3 includes all of the following
functions:

  dbclear   dbdown    dbnext    dbstack   dbstep    dbtype
  dbwhere   dbcont    dbquit    dbstatus  dbstop    dbup

I recommend that you upgrade.

jwe