I develop a large, mostly-cgi user interface for network appliances. Hence, large portions of my debugging are done passively via warns, traces, croaks and such in a virtualized environment.
The other day, a coworker and I were having a discussion and were thinking it be nice to be able to have a module which implemented a special kind of debugging syntax that would normally be interpreted as regular comments if the module was not included.
For instance:
some_function_call($var);
#$# warn Dumper($var);
Or a block-level approach:
#$#DEBUG
some_function_call();
another_function_call();
#$#END
I suppose, then, this is more of a two-part question on the capabilities of modules.
- is it possible to write a module that can keep lines starting with an certain string ("#$#" in this case) from being treated as comments like other lines beginning with "#"?
- could a module enable verbose tracing and execution, but only of certain specially-tagged blocks of code?
And a further supplemental question:
- Is this even a good approach to debugging an application in this kind of environment?