R help - Oct 2012 - Modern Symbolic debugger for R programmes?

I think I am whistling in the wind, but is there a modern symbolic
debugger for R programmes?

I am working through some  one else's code, thousands of lines, that
has the occasional bug in it, and a lot in my understanding of it.

I cannot make setBreakpoint or findLineNum  work.  I get "No source
refs found.".  I am starting to loose my mind!

A debugger where I could set breakpoints with a little more
granularity than the function level and a little more accessible than
the trace function.  What I ideally want is GDB for R.

Does that exist?

cheers
Worik

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Worik R <worikr at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I think I am whistling in the wind, but is there a modern symbolic
> debugger for R programmes?
>
> I am working through some  one else's code, thousands of lines, that
> has the occasional bug in it, and a lot in my understanding of it.
>
> I cannot make setBreakpoint or findLineNum  work.  I get "No source
> refs found.".  I am starting to loose my mind!
>
> A debugger where I could set breakpoints with a little more
> granularity than the function level and a little more accessible than
> the trace function.  What I ideally want is GDB for R.
>

trace("f", quote(browser()), 3)

will set a breakpoint at line 3 of function f and

body(f)

will list the body of f showing where the browser command was added.

Of course you could also edit the source of f and just insert a
browser() command yourself.

-- 
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com

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On 09/10/12 06:12, Worik R wrote:
> I think I am whistling in the wind, but is there a modern symbolic debugger
for R programmes?
> 
> I am working through some  one else's code, thousands of lines, that
has the occasional bug in
> it, and a lot in my understanding of it.
> 
> I cannot make setBreakpoint or findLineNum  work.  I get "No source
refs found.".  I am
> starting to loose my mind!
> 
> A debugger where I could set breakpoints with a little more granularity
than the function
> level and a little more accessible than the trace function.  What I ideally
want is GDB for R.
> 
> Does that exist?
There is quite some debugging fuctionality available in ESS for emacs
(http://ess.r-project.org/)
and I rmrmber a presentation at useR in 2011 that there is as well in eclipse,
but there you have
to used,. as far as I remember, a patched version of R.

So I would suggest to look into ESS for a debugger.

Cheers,

Rainer
> 
> cheers Worik
> 
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>> Worik R <worikr at gmail.com>
  >> on Tue, 9 Oct 2012 17:12:51 +1300 wrote:

  WR> I cannot make setBreakpoint or findLineNum  work.  I get "No
source
  WR> refs found.".  I am starting to loose my mind!

Indeed, as Rainer suggested, check out ESS. The ess-tracebug (part of
ESS) provides, among other things, source level debugging, breakpoints
and versatile watch window. A bit old but still relevant documentation
and screen-shots can be found here
http://code.google.com/p/ess-tracebug/

    Vitalie

On 12-10-09 12:12 AM, Worik R wrote:
> I think I am whistling in the wind, but is there a modern symbolic
> debugger for R programmes?
>
> I am working through some  one else's code, thousands of lines, that
> has the occasional bug in it, and a lot in my understanding of it.
>
> I cannot make setBreakpoint or findLineNum  work.  I get "No source
> refs found.".  I am starting to loose my mind!
You need to source the code with source references.  That is the default 
for source(), but not for package installation.  Set env variable 
R_KEEP_PKG_SOURCE=yes for command line installs; 
option(keep.source.pkgs=TRUE) for installs from within R.

Then you need to tell setBreakpoint where to look, through the "envir"
arg.  See the 2nd example in the help page.
> A debugger where I could set breakpoints with a little more
> granularity than the function level and a little more accessible than
> the trace function.  What I ideally want is GDB for R.
I thought you said you wanted a modern debugger :-).  GDB is very 80ish. 
I'm unaware of any debuggers that I would consider "modern", i.e.
like
the debuggers from the 90s, but there are a number of pre-modern choices 
that others have mentioned, and I don't think anyone has mentioned the 
debug package.

Duncan Murdoch