Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log

Paolo Amoroso's weblog. Main interests: Lisp, astronomy (Moon), space exploration (Apollo and early manned programs)

Calendar of past entries | Related links

McCLIM Lisp inspector: from cool demo to useful tool

Friday, March 11, 2005

Some time ago I blogged about how McCLIM's CLIM Listener was improving and becoming a valuable tool. Thanks to the work of Peter Scott, Clouseau, the McCLIM Lisp inspector, is getting a critical mass of useful features.

Within the past few days, Peter committed new Clouseau features and changes to the CVS tree, such as function disassembly and tracing. But the most interesting one is the ability of extending the inspector for application-specific objects. He writes in the manual: "It can be extended to aid in debugging of specific programs, similar to the way the Lisp printer can be extended with print-object". The manual provides this example:

Suppose that you're writing a statistics program and you want to specialize the inspector for your application. When you're looking at a sample of some characteristic of a population, you want to be able to inspect it and see some statistics about it, like the average. This is easy to do.

Peter has documented Clouseau in the McCLIM user's manual. See section Inspector: Clouseau of Part IV Utility Programs.