Home Articles FAQs XREF Games Software Instant Books BBS About FOLDOC RFCs Feedback Sitemap
irt.Org

source-level debugger

You are here: irt.org | FOLDOC | source-level debugger

<programming, tool> A debugger that shows the programmer the line or expression in the source code that resulted in a particular machine code instruction of a running program loaded in memory. This helps the programmer to analyse a program's behaviour in the high-level terms like source-level flow control constructs, procedure calls, named variables, etc instead of machine instructions and memory locations. Source-level debugging also makes it possible to step through execution a line at a time and set source-level breakpoints.

In order to support source-level debugging, the program must be compiled with this option enabled so that extra information is included in the executable code to identify the corresponding positions in the source code.

A symbolic debugger is one level lower - it displays symbols (procedure and variable names) stored in the executable but not individual source code lines.

GDB is a widely used example of a source-level debugger.

(2007-04-03)

Nearby terms: source code escrow « source code management « source language « source-level debugger » source of all good bits » source package » source route

FOLDOC, Topics, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, ?, ALL

©2018 Martin Webb