R Programming -Debugging Tools

Diagnosing the Problem

Indications that something’s not right

• message: A generic notification/diagnostic message produced by the message function; execution of the function continues
• warning: An indication that something is wrong but not necessarily fatal; execution of the function continues; generated by the warning function
• error: An indication that a fatal problem has occurred; execution stops; produced by the stop function
• condition: A generic concept for indicating that something unexpected can occur; programmers can create their own conditons

How do you know that something is wrong with your function?

• what was your input? How did you call the function?
• What were you expecting? Output, messages, other results?
• What did you get?
• How does what you get differ from what you were expecting?
• Were your expectations correct in the first place?
• Can you reproduce the problem(exactly)?

Basic Tools

The primary tools for debugging functions in R are

• traceback: prints out the function call stack after an error occurs does nothing if there’s no error
• debug: flags a function for “debug” mode which allows you to step through execution of a function one line at a time
• browser: suspends the execution of a function wherever it is called and puts the function in debug mode
• trace: allows you to insert debugging code into a function a specific places
• recover: allows you to modify the error behavior so that you can browse the function call stack

These are interactive tools specifically designed to allow you to pick through a function. There’s also the more blunt technique of inserting print/cat statements in the function.