Proposal of adding a debug function

[Krzesimir Nowak]

Hi,

I'd like to go straight into the matter:

Suggestion:
Adding to Octave3.1 a command called dbmode, which returns true when
debug mode is on, and false when it's off.

Rationale:
- Make it easy for external process to know in which mode Octave now is.
Here I think mainly about GUI which communicates with Octave through
some interprocess communication system (eg. DBus in my project).
- User writing a script could use this for debugging by writing:

if (dbmode())
	do_some_checking();
	#and zounds of printfs;
endif
End of rationale.

I attached a diff made with diff -u against version 3.1.51 and a
ChangeLog.
I compiled Octave and tested the function, and it seems to work (it's a
simple function, so there rather are no complications).

The only thing which may be disturbing is compatibility with MATLAB,
because I don't know if MATLAB has any function of that sort (MATLAB 7.0
doesn't have). I could think about it as an extension to MATLAB like ++
increment operator.

An example of my function:

octave3.1:6> dbstop("hopfield", 20)
ans =  23
octave3.1:7> dbmode
Debug mode is off
octave3.1:8> hopfield(0.5, 5);
hopfield: line 23, column 17
digits (:, :, 3) = [1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, 1; 1, -1, 1, 1, 1, -1, 1; 1,
-1, 1, 1, 1, -1, 1; 1, 1, 1, 1, -1, -1, 1; 1, 1, 1, -1, -1, 1, 1; 1, 1,
-1, -1, 1, 1, 1; 1, -1, -1, 1, 1, 1, 1; 1, -1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1; 1, -1, -1,
-1, -1, -1, 1]
keyboard: stopped in /home/kudi/projekty/octave/hopfield/hopfield.m at
line 23
debug> dbmode
Debug mode is on
debug> if (dbmode())
> printf("I'm in debbugging mode.\n");
> else
> printf("I'm not debugging now.\n");
> endif
I'm in debbugging mode.
debug> dbquit

octave3.1:8> if (dbmode())
> printf("I'm in debbugging mode.\n");
> else
> printf("I'm not debugging now.\n");
> endif
I'm not debugging now.
octave3.1:9> 

I wonder if a bug report for this is needed.

Thanks,
Krzesimir Nowak.

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