Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

402 Day 11
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The fact that conditional breakpoints slow down program execution
can work in your favor at times. If you have a process that you want to
view in slow motion, set one or more conditional breakpoints in that
section of code. Set the conditions so that they will never be met and
your program will be slowed down but not stopped.
The Run to Cursor Command
There is another debugging command that deserves mention here. The Run to Cursor
command (found under the Run menu on the main menu and on the Code Editor speed
menu) will run the program until the source line containing the editing cursor is reached. At
that point the program stops as if a breakpoint were placed on that line.
Run to Cursor acts like a temporary breakpoint. You can use this command rather than
setting a breakpoint on a line that you want to immediately inspect. Just place the cursor on
the line you want to break on and choose Run to Cursor (or press F4). The debugger behaves
exactly as if you had placed a breakpoint on that line. The benefit is that you don’t have to
clear the breakpoint after you are done debugging that section of code.
Watching Variables
So what do you do once you’ve stopped at a breakpoint? Usually you will stop at a breakpoint
to inspect the value of one or more variables. You might want to ensure that a particular
variable has the value you think it should have, or you may not have any idea what a variable’s
value is and simply want to find out. The Watch List allows you to do that.
The function of the Watch List is pretty basic: It allows you to inspect the values of variables.
This simple but essential feature often gets overlooked because a lot of programmers don’t
take the time to learn to use the debugger fully. You can add as many variables to the Watch
List as you like. Figure 11.4 shows the Watch List during a debugging session.
Figure 11.4.
The Watch List
in action.