6.2 Debugger panes

6.2.1 Context pane

The pane at the top of the debugger is the context pane. The context pane gives an overview of the state of the application thread to which the debugger is attached. You can hide the context pane by using View > Context Window.

Figure 6.2 The debugger's context pane.

Here, the application stopped because there is a breakpoint on the call to play-reversi in start-reversi.dylan. That is the function call that starts the application running. The rules for what appears in the context pane are as follows.

If you paused the application yourself, by choosing Application > Pause, or by clicking the pause toolbar button (), the message "User requested pause" appears in the context pane of all open debugger windows.

If the application paused because of some other event,

the context pane for the debugger on the thread that caused the pause shows a message explaining why that thread paused the application.
the context pane in all other open debuggers shows the message "Stopped in Thread x", where x is the name of the thread that has stopped.

Often the message describes an unhandled Dylan error or breakpoint. The message could also describe an out-of-language error (for example in foreign code) or one of a number of application events upon which you can ask the debugger to pause the application, such as when a library is loaded. You can see a list of possible exceptions and the actions that will be taken upon them in the Debugger Options dialog. See Section 6.15 on page 129.