Debugging

Printf and friends

The simplest approach is to use Debug.Trace.trace:

trace :: String -> a -> a

"When called, trace outputs the string in its first argument, before returning the second argument as its result.'"

A common idiom to trace a function is:

myfun a b | trace ("myfun " ++ show a ++ " " ++ show b) False = undefined
myfun a b = ...

The advantage is that disabling and enabling the trace takes only one line comment.

You must keep in mind that due to lazy evaluation your traces will only print if the value they wrap is ever demanded.

A more powerful alternative for this approach is Hood [2]. Even if it hasn't been updated in some time, Hood works perfectly with the current ghc distribution. Even more, Hugs has it already integrated, see the manual page. You can simply import Observe and use observations directly in your program. For instance:

import Hugs.Observe

f'  = observe "Informative name for f" f 
f x = if odd x then x*2 else 0

And then in hugs:

Main> map f' [1..5]
[2,0,6,0,10]

>>>>>>> Observations <<<<<<

Informative name for f
  { \ 5  -> 10
  , \ 4  -> 0
  , \ 3  -> 6
  , \ 2  -> 0
  , \ 1  -> 2
  }

outputs a report of all the invocations of f and their result:

Offline analysis of traces

The most advanced debugging tools are based in offline analysis of traces. Hat is probably the most up-to-date tool for this, offering a comprehensive set of tools. Neil Mitchell has made available a Windows port of Hat at his site.

The disadvantage of these tools is that they are not always compatible with the latest libraries, so you can put them to use only in some cases.

Some Hat user should complete this section

Dynamic breakpoints in GHCi

Finally, the GHC/GHCiDebugger project aims to bring dynamic breakpoints and intermediate values observation to GHCi in a near future. Right now the tool is only available from the site as a modified version of GHC, so unfortunately you will have to compile it yourself if you want to have it.

This tool allows to set breakpoints in your code, directly from the GHCi command prompt. An example session:

*main:Main> :break add Main 2
Breakpoint set at (2,15)
*main:Main> qsort [10,9..1]
Local bindings in scope:
  x :: a, xs :: [a], left :: [a], right :: [a]
 
qsort2.hs:2:15-46> :sprint x
x = _
qsort2.hs:2:15-46> x
This is an untyped, unevaluated computation. You can use seq to 
force its evaluation and then :print to recover its type
qsort2.hs:2:15-46> seq x ()
() 
qsort2.hs:2:15-46> :p x
x - 10

Once a breakpoint is hit, you can explore the bindings in scope, as well as to evaluate any haskell expression, as you would do in a normal GHCi prompt. The ':print' command can be very useful to explore the lazyness of your code.

Catching Assert trick

See the mail message.

Other tricks

• If you use GHC, you can get a stack trace in the console when your program fails with an error condition. See the manual page