[BLUEJ-399] Objection to Design of Debugger Window
I think that the separate Instance Variables pane in the Debugger window is misleading.
It would be much better to eliminate the Instance Variables pane entirely.
Instead keep the Local Variables pane and divide it into scope based regions using colors. Of course, the outermost scope belongs to the parameters of the method ... the first, implicit, parameter is always the this object reference.
This would be truer to the actual semantics of Java both at the bytecode level and at the source level and better preparation for the rigors of object-oriented programming in, e.g., Python or C++.
The current setup makes nonsense of code like,
public boolean equals(final Student other) { bq. if (this == other) bq. ... }
because the this reference does not appear to exist in the debugger.
Issue metadata
- Issue type: Bug
- Priority: Medium
- Fix versions: 3.1.6