From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-09-05T01:50:14+09:00
Subject: [ANN] breakpoint.rb

Moin!

Breakpoint.rb is a small library that lets you set breakpoints by 
calling a method. When executed, a breakpoint causes an interactive ruby 
session to be spawned with the current context. This makes it especially 
useful for debugging because Ruby has powerful built-in capabilities for 
exploring object environments. (Kernel#caller, Object#inspect, 
Object#respond_to?, Kernel#local_variables, Object#instance_variables 
and so on.)

There's also support for overriding return values and for an assert() 
method that automatically sets a breakpoint in case an unexpected 
situation occurs.

I wrote this because I constantly found myself placing calls to p() in 
my code when debugging -- I think that this library is a good 
replacement for doing that which is the reason of me releasing it.

The code and documentation (including a sample session) is available 
from the following URL:

http://cb.wardust.net/codepaste/view/paste/54

You'll need to have Binding.of_caller available. It can be obtained at 
this location:

http://noegnud.sourceforge.net/flgr/binding_of_caller.rb

This should be easier to use than the debug.rb that comes with Ruby, but 
debug.rb is more powerful overall. (It has stepping capabilities, for 
example.)

I'm currently overloading IRB.start -- If anybody knows of a better way 
to spawn an irb session with a custom binding: I'd love to hear about it.

Regards,
Florian Gross