Breakpoint

From Free net encyclopedia

For other uses, see Breakpoint (disambiguation).

A breakpoint, in software development, is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring knowledge about a program during its execution. During the interruption, the programmer inspects the test environment (logs, memory, files, etc.) to find out whether the program functions as expected.

In practice, a breakpoint consists of one or more conditions that determine when a program's execution should be interrupted.

Most commonly, the program's execution is interrupted before a programmer-specified instruction is executed. However, not always does a debugger allow a programmer to specify any instructions because instruction(s) located in branch delay slot are to be executed atomically. Otherwise, branch instruction may not take its effect correctly.

Other kinds of conditions, such as the reading, writing, modification of a specific area in memory, or at a particular time, or upon a keystroke, are also used.

See also

• COMEFROM statementit:Breakpoint