[Bluej-discuss] Two Feature Requests

[Davin McCall]

Hi Chris,

> 1. If I terminate a debugging session I lose my breakpoints. I realise 
> that recompiling poses problems for breakpoints, but why does 
> terminating a debugging session erase them?

To answer your question, it's essentially the same reason as for recompiling, that is, the classes must be reloaded. This is necessary to re-run any static initializers (for instance, field declarations in the form of "static SomeType SomeVariable = SomeExpression();") and also because terminating a debugging session in fact terminates the entire java VM process which has to be restarted, which in turn means that all classes have to be reloaded again.

BlueJ could however be made to save the breakpoint positions before the terminate and restore them afterwards (and I agree with you, this would be better behaviour).

> 
> 2. Would it be possible to have an option to remove a class without its 
> source file being deleted?
> 

Why would you want to do this?

I'm sure there's some reason or obviously you wouldn't ask, but I can't help feel that it might be so obscure as to make adding the feature unwarranted. Certainly there are plenty of other ways to get the same effect (depending on exactly why you want to do it): you can copy the source somewhere else before you delete the class in BlueJ, you can rename the class, you can comment out the whole file...

Davin