6.9.1 About the interaction pane

The debugger's interaction pane provides a prompt (where you can enter Dylan expressions and definitions for execution. The prompt is a question mark (?).

The interaction pane is similar to what some other languages call a listener tool, and it provides the "read-eval-print" model of interaction that is standard in those tools. However, in Functional Developer interactions, the "eval" phase is not really evaluation. It consists of compiling your code and then sending the compiled code to the paused application thread itself, where it is executed, modifying the state of the thread accordingly. This means that you can interactively add features to an application and even redefine parts of it, all while the application is still running.

The size of the interaction pane differs according to the situation. See "Changing the debugger layout" on page 110 for details of the different layouts and how to change them.

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Getting Started with Functional Developer - 31 MAR 2000