What is Debugging?

Debugging is the process of finding and correcting errors or undesirable behavior in your code. The IDL Workbench supplies tools that let you monitor the execution of your program, stop and re-start execution, step through the program one statement at a time, and inspect or change the values of variables.

The debugging process begins when IDL temporarily stops execution before it reaches the end of your program. There are two ways this can occur: when IDL encounters an error that forces either compilation or execution to halt, or when IDL encounters a breakpoint you have set in the code to cause a temporary halt. Note that not every error in your code will cause IDL to halt execution; many problems involve code that runs correctly to completion but creates incorrect results.

Debugging tools in the IDL Workbench include the following:

Automatic detection of compilation errors

Facilities for creating and managing breakpoints

Facilities for stepping through code after execution has halted

Facilities for inspecting and changing variable values

Workbench views that provide information about errors and the current state of the IDL interpreter

About the Debug Perspective

The IDL Workbench provides a special Debug perspective that collects the workbench views most useful when debugging code. By default, the Debug, Breakpoints, and Profiler views are displayed in the Debug perspective; for a complete description of the debugging views, see Debugging Tools.

Note
The first time you execute IDL code that contains an error or a breakpoint, the IDL Workbench will ask if you want to switch to the Debug perspective. See Automatic Perspective Switching for details.