What is the Think Pascal debugger that makes it so legendary?

Question

I sharpened coding knives and returned to dev. A few years ago, many people noted that the Symantec Think Pascal debugger, which appeared on the (classic) Mac, was an absolute bee lap and that nothing else was like anywhere else. I found this statement strange, given that no one was trying to clone the debugger mentioned ... what exactly made the special debugger so special?

Answer 1

Responding to this as someone who worked in (pre-Symantec), think of a small role while the Macintosh Pascal (1984) was being developed.

This was revolutionary for two reasons: firstly, it was an incremental compiler. Getting rid of the edit-compile-link loop is a huge advantage. If you are Google Mel Conway (the main scientist at Think), I believe that you will find some notes on creating incremental compilers (I looked at his main site before publication and it seems to be under construction).

The second reason was that it was a graphical interface when there was nothing, and it worked with the actual program code. To compare this, I don’t think that symbolic debuggers for MS-DOS or Mac were available until several years later (I recall one Mac project in 1985/86, when I constantly interpreted the dump assembly for the rest of the command), and they are far away from source level debugging. Microsoft released an entry-level debugger with Quick C in 1988 (iirc); I have never worked with Turbo-Pascal or Turbo-C, so I don’t know what they had.

Today, almost the entire IDE gives you equal or better debugging features ...

Answer 2

While I was hoping to hear from a wider circle of people, it occurred to me that most of you are on the edge of the current material, and there are not many of you who even remember Windows 95, not to mention the classic Mac OS ( that is, System 6) .... it’s good and in itself, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t take that into account.

While Mike Robinson is adding interesting information, I lowered my ass and stumbled upon the following three links. In short, it seems that the Think Pascal debugger was also an interpreter that could execute arbitrary code ... so you could set breakpoints, isolate the error, and then enter the proposed fix in the code window and see how to execute the code ... or whatever something like that. Naturally, I would like to hear from as many people as possible, but for now:

Think Pascal 4.5.a1 is available here.

Interesting topic on Think Pascal on the Mac 68k Liberation Army forum

Comparison with Codewarrior

Answer 3

I loved THINK Pascal. The debugger was awesome and unthinkable for its time. Only after using Eclipse in the last few years did I have something close to the meaning of Wow that TP gave me - everything has been a compromise so far, a step back.

THINK Pascal drew attention to the user interface, to the usability, which I tried to transfer to the programs that I wrote with it. His programmers gave me respect to think that it could be important for me, something was painted, or where I could access it, spent time on it and made a great choice. Although other tools then and since then were more powerful - MPW, Apple Macintosh Programmer Workshop, for a notable example - their power was inaccessible, poorly organized (from the point of view of a naive user) and unfriendly - you had to be "in the club", " to use it (basically it means that you are a unixy command-line user.) THINK Pascal put the goodies where I could get to them.

It's hard to rebuild what I loved about TP, come up with specific features that made it great, and I'm really sorry. If I have a chance, I will open my old email account and see if I can come up with the specifics.