6 Debugging and Interactive Development

6.11 Breakpoints

Functional Developer allows you to set breakpoints on application code from within any window. Breakpoints allow you to pause an application at a predefined point in execution, in order to examine it in a debugger window. You can set breakpoints on Dylan code lines in a source code file or on suitable generic functions, methods, and functions.

Non-pausing breakpoints are also available. These breakpoints do not pause the thread when execution reaches them, but simply log a message in the debugger interaction pane to say they have been reached. To distinguish breakpoints that pause the application from non-pausing breakpoints, we sometimes call them pausing breakpoints.

You can set, disable, and clear breakpoints from any Functional Developer tool that has an Application menu. In addition, you can use the shortcut (right-click) menu to do the same on any selected method in the project window or browser. Finally, you can set breakpoints on lines of code in the editor and on the browser Source page.

It is possible for the same code to be shown with different sets of breakpoints in different contexts. When looking at source in the browser or debugger, the set of breakpoints shown is that for the project being browsed. Within the editor, the set of breakpoints shown is that for the active project.