Perl debugging

Posted on December 12th, 2003 in General by robh

Whilst trying to find out what was happening in a Perl script I had reason to refer to the debugging perldoc page (perldoc perldebug). As this was on a FreeBSD-STABLE box it was running a fairly old version of Perl (5.003 I think) for which the debugging documentation contained a good quote which appears to have been removed from more recent versions of the documentation. I have therefore reproduced it here:

“As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized
that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in
finding mistakes in my own programs.”

–Maurice Wilkes, 1949

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