What is it about the Think Pascal debugger that makes it so legendary ?

Question

I have been sharpening the coding knives and getting back into dev. A few years ago, many people mentioned that the Symantec Think Pascal debugger that came on the (classic) Mac was the absolute bee's knees, and that nothing else was like it anywhere. I found that statement odd, considering that no one has tried to clone said debugger... what was it exactly that made this particular debugger so special ?

Answer 1

While I had hoped to hear from a wider variety of people, it has occurred to me that most of you are on the bleeding edge current stuff, and there are not too many of you who even remember Windows 95, let alone the classic Mac OS (i.e., System 6).... that is a good thing in and of itself, don't get me wrong, but I failed to take that into account.

While Mike Robinson adds an interesting insight, I Googled my ass off and came across the following three links. To make a long story short, it seems that the Think Pascal debugger was also an interpreter that could execute arbitrary code... so one could set breakpoints, isolate a bug, then type a proposed fix into the code window and see the code execute... or something like that. Naturally, I would want to hear from as many people as possible, but for now :

Here is the Think Pascal 4.5.a1 publicly available

An interesting thread on Think Pascal at the Mac 68k Liberation Army forum

A comparison to Codewarrior

Answer 2

Answering this as someone who worked at (pre-Symantec) Think in a minor role while Macintosh Pascal was being developed (1984).

It was revolutionary for two reasons: first, it was an incremental compiler. Getting rid of the edit-compile-link-test cycle is a huge benefit. If you Google Mel Conway (chief scientist at Think), I believe you'll find some notes on the construction of incremental compilers (I looked at his main site before posting and it seems to be under construction).

The second reason was that it was a GUI, when nothing else was, and worked with actual program code. To put this in comparison, I don't believe that symbolic debuggers for MS-DOS or the Mac were available until several years later (I recall one Mac project in 1985/86 where I was constantly interpreting the assembly dumps for the rest of the team), and they're a far cry from source-level debugging. Microsoft released a source-level debugger with Quick C in 1988 (iirc); I never worked with Turbo-Pascal or Turbo-C, so don't know what they had.

Today, pretty much every IDE gives you equal or better debugging features ...

Answer 3

I loved THINK Pascal. The debugger was awesome, and unthinkably so for its time. Not until using Eclipse in the past few years have I had anything approaching the sense of Wow that TP gave me - everything up until now has been a compromise, a step back.

THINK Pascal gave the kind of attention to user interface, to usability, that I tried to give to the programs I was writing with it. Its programmers gave me the respect of thinking it might matter to me what something was colored, or where I could access it, spent time considering this and made great choices. Although other tools then and since have been more powerful - MPW, Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, for notable example - their power was inaccessible, poorly organized (from the perspective of a naive user), and unfriendly - you had to be "in the club" to take advantage of it (basically, that meant being a unixy commandline user). THINK Pascal put the goodies out where I could reach them.

It is hard to reconstruct what I loved about TP, to come up with specific features that made it great, and I'm sorry. If I get a chance I'll crack open my old email account and see if I can come up with specifics.