[Eric] Wish: Debug option to move program counter

[Hans-Peter Jansen]

Hi Tobias, hi Detlev,

On Dienstag, 14. März 2017 19:14:50 Tobias Rzepka wrote:
> Hello Pete, hello Detlev,
> 
> I've done already a proof of concept for the debugger. There are some
> constraints given by Python but it works to change the instruction pointer
> in a function/ method without executing the code between the actual and new
> instruction pointer.
> 
> I think, it could be very helpful a lot of times. I'll work on it further as
> one of the next topics.... Tobias

Thank you very much for this feature. 

It helps me to test conditions, that usually not happen, as well as repeat 
some code segments with different values in minutes. Hey students, you 
hopefully write test code to get 100% code coverage, do you?

This reminded me about the very beginnings of my hacking career, where I 
programmed 680x0 assembler on the Atari ST. Thanks to a great debugger called 
MonST, I really was able to grasp the inner workings of these CPUs.

Later, I worked for a company, that supplied Ethernet network hardware and 
software for those Ataris, which I also installed in business environments. 
At that time, I always installed a reset resident version of this debugger on 
all systems. Since Atari programs weren't created with networks in mind and 
some aspects of network file systems couldn't be hidden from them, a few rare  
network operations resulted in crashes, where MonST chimed in, and - guess 
what - I often was able to recover such a crashed machine be changing the 
instruction counter and/or a few register values.. Imagine the face 
expressions of users, that watched me doing that for the first time.

Using Python, debugging is a little less important, but occasionally, having 
sophisticated debugging purposes at hand, is most effective. 

Eric is my favorite Python development environment since a long time, and I 
enjoy it nearly every day. Although my contributions to the Eric code base is 
near zero unfortunately (sorry Detlev), I advertise it on a regular base.

Thank you, Detlev, you're doing a great job!

Tobias, thank you for supporting Eric (and Detlev). It really deserves it!

Pete