MichaelMeissner
Senior Member+
I am curious what batch tracing is...
Batch tracing is just print statements. On the Teensy, it would be connected to the USB stream, which you can scroll back.
It is how we debugged things in my high school and early college days when I programmed the computer with a deck of Hollerith punch cards (or punched paper tape), that you gave to the attendant and some time later a ream of printer paper output along with your cards/tape would appear in your output basket. A lot of those runs were overnight (the owner of the computer would use it for the normal business during the day, but at night they would do some runs from the local school), so you only had one shot a day to do the programming.
Lets see, my first High School I programmed in Fortran (Fortran 66), at the other High School after we moved, it was Cobol. At college, Pascal was used (it was a pain doing all of the special characters on the 026 card punch which did not have characters like ';'), and other languages (CDC 6600 assembly, Snobol, and I don't remember what else). Eventually they got terminals hooked up to the computer (both 110 baud teletypes and those fast 300 baud CRTs), and cards faded away. Towards the end, I got to play with the UNIX (v6) system and its directly connected console.
On each of the GCC ports I've worked on, I tend to put in various undocumented debug options that spit out a lot of output, and then I can use grep or custom perl scripts to look for what I want. Yeah, I use gdb as well, but a lot of times, bugs occur as a result of various complex interactions, and it is simpler to just let it run, and sift through it later.
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