Almost every programmer knows about watch points. Especially the ones doing native development with C/C++. Watch points were really helpful to me when I was working with C/C++. They were, sort of, my go to weapons whenever I wanted to understand how some third party code worked. It was something that I dearly missed when I started with Ruby. I am fairly new to Ruby and I have never used the ruby-debug (or ruby-debug19) gem, because until today simple print statements were sufficient most of the times.
Today I was at a loss as I was unable to figure out where a particular hash variable was getting two new key-value pairs in it. It was an instance variable with just an attr_reader defined. So obviously a reference to the instance variable was being passed around to the place where it was being modified. So my initial idea of writing a custom write accessor method was probably not going to work (did not try it). That is when I came across this http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/trouble.html#S3. The last bullet point in that section has the answer.
You just freeze the object/variable that you want to watch by calling the "freeze" instance method on that object and anyone modifying that object after it's frozen will cause an exception to be raised giving you the precise location of where that modification is happening. This isn't probably as elegant as running a debugger and setting a watch point but it gets the work done nevertheless. RTFM after all..!! This tool is definitely going into my belt. :)
Today I was at a loss as I was unable to figure out where a particular hash variable was getting two new key-value pairs in it. It was an instance variable with just an attr_reader defined. So obviously a reference to the instance variable was being passed around to the place where it was being modified. So my initial idea of writing a custom write accessor method was probably not going to work (did not try it). That is when I came across this http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/trouble.html#S3. The last bullet point in that section has the answer.
You just freeze the object/variable that you want to watch by calling the "freeze" instance method on that object and anyone modifying that object after it's frozen will cause an exception to be raised giving you the precise location of where that modification is happening. This isn't probably as elegant as running a debugger and setting a watch point but it gets the work done nevertheless. RTFM after all..!! This tool is definitely going into my belt. :)
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