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Debugging woes on python

Glenn Reed glenn.r at ihug.co.nz.nospam
Mon Oct 13 05:08:42 EDT 2003 
This is just a general comment after trying my hand at some serious python
programming for the first time.  Have played with it for some time but this
is the first serious thing I've done with it.  (By serious I mean 650 lines
of python code written for a client).

The version of Python is the ActiveState version for Windows which included
PythonWin IDE.

Prior to that I learn't Perl and used it for sometime.  What I miss with
python is the lack of a straightforward command line debugger.  That is
setting breakpoints and going step, step, step thru my code and examining
variables as appropriate.  While I enjoyed Python's better syntax I found
Python's debugger frustrating and basically found it unusable.  I could set
breakpoints by using PythonWin but I couldn't step thru the code.  The worst
thing was that I couldn't list the source code or see any visual recognition
of stepping thru source code.   The debugger was Python's pdb module.  Is
there anything better for python?  It didn't take me this long to get
started with Perl's command line (non-GUI) debugger.

Thanks in advance
Glenn.
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