I've written a source level debugger (edebug) for GNU Emacs Lisp that
is approaching the generality required to handle Common Lisp as well.
There are two major phases of the system. First, code is
"instrumented" by parsing it (like read but one subexpression at a
time) and wrapping subexpressions and their positions with calls to
the debugger. Second, the code is evaluated and current positions are
"highlighted" in some way.
I'm not familiar with enough CL environments to know what is still
required for the second part of the debugger, but I would like to
eventually accomplish this in a general, customizable way. At this
stage I would appreciate feedback from people on what they think would
be required for the environments they are familiar with.
Also, since this is a masters thesis topic, I'd like to report on what
other source-level debugging systems are available for Lisp environments.
I'll summarize your email. Thanks.
Dan LaLiberte
·······@cs.uiuc.edu
(Join the League for Programming Freedom: ······@prep.ai.mit.edu)