[elk] Elk debugging tools

[Derek Peschel <dpeschel@eskimo.com>]

Has anyone compared Elk to other Schemes in the area of debugger support,
or thought about improving Elk?

I've been looking at various open-source Schemes.  Some are novice projects.
On the other hand, some are big complicated expert projects.  Elk is mature
but not overly complex, so it's relatively easy for me to understand and
incrementally change.  The bigger changes I'm thinking of require getting
into the guts of the evaluator, which I've only started looking at.

It seems like the non-novice non-expert Schemes all have strengths and weak-
nesses.  Elk has no stepping, doesn't save line numbers from source files,
and has limited actions after an error.  (For example, I don't think you can
define an undefined variable and then retry the code that tried to use it.)

Guile, on the other hand, has stepping (in fact a very nice package for
saying when the debugger should get control) and saves line numbers.  But
you can't act on a continuation that caused an error, only inspect it.

So I'm picking up bits of knowledge from each implementation I look at
and hoping the total will eventually be useful.

Thanks,

-- Derek
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