"John-Reed Maffeo" <rlpa80 at email.sps.mot.com> wrote...
>> What is the way to trace the execution of a 'program'. I would really
>> like to be able to watch the progression of message sends to get a
>> better idea of how things work together.

"Bolot Kerimbaev" <bolot at cc.gatech.edu> responded...
>On Oct 22, 1998 Dan Ingalls posted a note:
>A year ago I put ObjectTracer and ObjectViewer into Squeak.  Less than a
>page of code with a lot of power.  They let you implement exactly this kind
>of wrapper behavior if you want |to.  There are no frills, but if you want
>to do this kind of tracing, they make it pretty |easy.

This can be useful for grabbing hold of an active object and tracing the messages that get set to it.

However, for tracing a program, I think Squeak's MessageTally is unbeatable.  The normal spyOn: method is used for performance analysis, and presents frequently executed methods in their tree of execution.

What many people don't know is that I grafted the context-stepping simulator onto the messageTally structure, so that you can get a MessageTally tree of exact execution counts from any program fragment.  Try the example

	MessageTally tallySends: [3.14159 printString]

for a picture worth a thousand words.

You can run this on any program that the Context stepper can handle, which is most things other than Process switches.  I ran this for 8 hours once on the Squeak interpreter itself -- it was very informative.

Enjoy
	- Dan