In the near beginning there was the Bourne shell /bin/sh (written by S. R. Bourne). It had (and still does) a very strong powerful syntactical language built into it, with all the features that are commonly considered to produce structured programs; it has particularly strong provisions for controlling input and output and in its expression matching facilities. But no matter how strong its input language is, it had one major drawback; it made nearly no concessions to the interactive user (the only real concession being the use of shell functions and these were only added later) and so there was a gap for something better.read more...
The standard Perl distribution comes with a debugger, although it's really just another Perl program, perl5db.pl. Since it is just a program, I can use it as the basis for writing my own debuggers to suit my needs, or I can use the interface perl5db.pl provides to configure its actions. That's just the beginning, though. read more...
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