Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

Using the Debugger
The fastest way to edit a watch item is to double-click on its name in
the Watch List.
Enabling and Disabling Watch Items
As with breakpoints, individual items in the Watch List can be enabled or disabled. When
a watch item is disabled, it is grayed and its value shows .
To disable a watch item, click on the item’s name in the Watch List and choose Disable
Watch from the Watch List speed menu. To enable the watch item again, choose Enable
Watch from the speed menu.
NOTE
You may want to disable watch items that you don’t currently want to
watch but that you will need again later. Having a number of enabled
items in the Watch List can slow down program execution during the
debugging process because all the variables in the Watch List must be
updated each time a line of code executes. It doesn’t take many items in
the Watch List to slow things down, so don’t forget to delete or disable
any unused items in the Watch List.
Adding Variables to the Watch List
You can add variables to the Watch List in one of several ways. The quickest is to click on
the variable name in the editor window and then select Add Watch at Cursor from the Code
Editor speed menu or press Ctrl+F5. The Watch Properties dialog box will be displayed,
where you can either select watch options for the watch item or click OK (or press Enter) to
accept the defaults. The watch item will be added to the Watch List.
To add a variable to the watch without first locating it in the source file, choose Run | Add
Watch from the main menu. When the Watch Properties dialog box comes up, enter the
name of the variable you want to add to the Watch List and click OK.
NOTE
TIP
Although you can add a class instance variable to the Watch List, the
displayed value will not likely be useful. In the case of pointers to
objects, this is useful for determining if the pointer is valid, but often
405
11