[alhazrod]

Wow! That sounds amazing. I know people often compliment the debuggers for Smalltalk (Squeak/Pharo today), Common Lisp (SLIME/Sly) and Clojure (FlowStorm). Could you tell me more about the VB debugger? Are there other amazing debuggers I do not know about?

[antisol]

I second GP's sentiment. That debugger was amazing. I've never seen anything that can touch it to this day.

Tell you more: you could also just run code to do things like change variables in the immediate window while execution was paused, so e.g that example where you want to re-run some loop: first you drag the PC arrow back to above the loop as GP already described, then in the immediate window you can just run things like e.g:

  someVariable="initial value"

To reset vars back to their initial values, or clean out buggy data, or whatever.

then you can just step through the code or resume execution.

I used to use it a LOT for handling edge cases on long-running, one-off things: run the code until it hits an error, fix the error by doing some stuff in the immediate window, resume the loop without re-processing the 100K items you've already processed.

The destruction of VB with no upgrade path (the advice was to "just" rewrite your perfectly-functional 100KLOC codebase) is what pushed me away from MS, first to delphi and then to FOSS. But that VB6 debugger was IMO probably the best thing MS has ever done.

[keernan]

The Excel VBA debugger isn't much different. I love the VBA debugger. It is so seamless to step through code - correct in place - continue stepping to be sure the code works (split screen to see the code and its impact in the worksheet with updating turned on).

[hboon]

Still Smalltalk, but Dolphin Smalltalk which runs on Windows.

It was the best Windows app development too. You can write native Windows programs and it worked even better than Visual Studio for COM and ActiveX stuff.

[igouy]

Also, back in the day, Digitalk Smalltalk/V Win and Smalltalk/V VSE.