The Python Visualizer has limitations, it does not allow import statements and it stops tracing after 500 steps. Idle comes with a debugger, which is a tool much like the visualizer, but without the pretty pictures. Here we see functions convert to minutes and convert to seconds, which we explored in last week's lectures. Turn on this in IDLE's debugger. We're going to make sure that the Python shell window is on top, and then select debug-, debugger. This opens a window called debug control. I am now going to, to resize this so that we can see everything as we execute. We're going to check the check box for source. Then, we're going to come back here to our module that we want to debug and select run, run module. This middle area displays the call stack, or at least the functions that have been called. Down here are the variables inside the current call. Notice that the variable for built ins is there, as our three other variables that we haven't discussed yet in this course. Step is like forward in the visualizer. We'll define our two functions. Notice we have variables down here. All for them, referring to functions. This right here, that's a memory address. You'll notice it does letters in it. That's because it's base sixteen, which uses in, in a lot of programming the numbers zero through nine, plus the letters A, B, C, D, E and F, for a total of sixteen characters. Over here we see there's a grey highlight on the current line. And line twenty happens to be that line. So we're told here which line is being executed. When we step we're gonna do the function called convert to seconds. We only have parameters num hours available so far seconds convert to seconds. If we want to see the, the variables in the module, we can just click there and that switches the view for the local speed, the local variables. We're gonna back to convert to seconds and step into the call to convert to minutes. We now have three items on the call stack, involved in that program. Let's step one more line to define our variable minutes. Minutes is now 120. Just to check, we're gonna go back to the frame for convert to seconds, and notice that it only has one variable num hours. The reason is, we haven't finished this call to convert to minutes, and so this variable minutes has not yet been created. I'm going to switch the view back to, the top frame. And, when I step, it's actually just going to execute the return statement all at once including popping the frame from the stack. We don't get to see the return value before the return happens. So we're back in convert to seconds, we're about to evaluate 120 times 60 and assign the result to seconds, there we go 7,200 and we're going to return 7,200 back to. This call to convert to seconds, and. It's going to create a variable seconds, in the. Stack frame for the main module. Switching our view back and clicking step, causes our. Program to end because, this was the last statement in the program. Let's switch back to there and notice that we do have a variable seconds and created. So it's a little confusing at the end of a program because if on a return statement, and that return statement is inside a function that is on the last instruction that gets executed, the program will end and this stackframe won't be removed because the debugger doesn't update at the end of a program once the program is done.
