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Preface
October 1980

The facilities documented here are the workings of an interactive Mesa debugger. It has been designed to support source level debugging; it provides facilities that allow users to set breakpoints, trace program execution, display the runtime state, and interpret Mesa statements. Due to the amount of space required to provide all of these capabilities, the Mesa debugger lives a core swap away from the program being debugged.

This documentation is divided into seven parts. Section 1 is an overview, Section 2 describes the user interface, Section 3 explains the debugger’s input conventions and contains a summary of the command tree structure, Section 4 explains the semantics of each command, Section 5 explains the debugger interpreter, Section 6 explains the debugger’s output conventions, and Section 7 explains signal and error messages. The Mesa User’s Handbook contains further details on how to obtain, install, and use the debugger.

The Mesa debugger is intended for use by experienced programmers already familiar with Mesa. All comments on the form, correctness, and understandability of this document should be sent to your support group. All of us involved in the development of Mesa welcome feedback and suggestions on debugger development.