Debugging on the Mac question.

[Sean Murphy]

Team,


I am a Vision Impaired programmer on the Mac and Window platforms. I have started to learn Python. The biggest road block I have is the ability of debugging my simple scripts. The IDLE program does not work with the screen readers I use on the Mac or Windows. A screen reader is a program that grabs the text on the screen and converts it into speech output, at least this is the 50000 feet explanation. I cannot see the screen at all.

I have looked at eclipse and it doesn't work with Voice-Over (the screen reader on the Mac). I have java issues on my windows machine preventing me running this app.

If I use $python -d script.py the debugger doesn't seem to trigger on the mac.

So how I can perform a debug on a script so I can step through it, set up break points, watch variables, etc.

It is really annoying me, since under Perl I just added the -d switch and had a full debugger that worked at the console level.

Sean

 

[Paul Rudin]

I am a Vision Impaired programmer on the Mac and Window platforms. I have
started to learn Python. The biggest road block I have is the ability of
debugging my simple scripts. The IDLE program does not work with the screen
readers I use on the Mac or Windows. A screen reader is a program that grabs
the text on the screen and converts it into speech output, at least this is the
50000 feet explanation. I cannot see the screen at all.

I have looked at eclipse and it doesn't work with Voice-Over (the screen reader
on the Mac). I have java issues on my windows machine preventing me running
this app.

If I use $python -d script.py the debugger doesn't seem to trigger on the mac.

So how I can perform a debug on a script so I can step through it, set up break
points, watch variables, etc.

It is really annoying me, since under Perl I just added the -d switch and had a
full debugger that worked at the console level.

For command line debugging see
<http://docs.python.org/3/library/pdb.html>.


More generally you might want to investigate
<http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/> (disclaimer - I have never used
this, but from what you say you might find it useful).

 

[Sean Murphy]

PETER,

thanks Peter, I have already found the PDB module and have had a play with it. It will do for now.