10.5281/zenodo.3254726
https://zenodo.org/records/3254726
oai:zenodo.org:3254726
Raskin Michael
Raskin Michael
0000-0002-6660-5673
Aarhus University
Mamardashvili Nikita
Mamardashvili Nikita
Moscow Center for Continuous Mathematical Education
Accessing local variables during debugging
Zenodo
2016
Software testing and debugging
lexical environment
lexical closures
2016-05-09
eng
10.5281/zenodo.3254725
https://zenodo.org/communities/els
Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International
Any reasonably large program has to use local variables. It is quite common in the Lisp language family to also allow functions that exist only in a local scope. Scoping rules often allow compilers to optimize away parts of the local environment; doing that is good for performance, but sometimes inconvenient for debugging.
We present a debugging library for Common Lisp that ensures access to the local variables during debugging. To prevent the optimisations from removing access to these variables, we use code-walking macros to store references to the local variables (and functions) inside global variables.