Watch expressions

amire80 wrote on Thu Jun 14 10:12:05 MEST 2007:

Jan, thanks a lot for fixing bug 1735629.

Out of curiosity: Is there any chance that watch expressions will work any
time soon? I'm sure that everyone will agree that using them is easier than
scrolling through a long list of all the variables.

I do admit that this EPIC problem caused me to refactor my code better,
use less global variables and group my global constants into hashes which
share a common theme.

jploski wrote on Tue Jun 19 17:53:12 MEST 2007:

Amir, I have no immediate plans to implement watch expressions. I agree
that it is desirable functionality, just don't have the time. One important
lesson from the recent debugger enhancements is that adding a so-called
watchfunction to perl5db (even an empty one) can greatly reduce the debugger's
performance. I can imagine that watch expressions defined using the command-line
interface might lead to similar performance problems.