My master's work was in the context of debugging. I spent a great deal of time reading descriptions of ancient debugging systems - most far in advance of the ca

My master's work was in the context of debugging. I spent a great deal of time reading descriptions of ancient debugging systems - most far in advance of the capabilities of the present day. The height of the art was reached in the early 90s - sophisticated logic structures over your program state were being held over your program state to automatically trigger actions - reverse debuggers were done back in the '70s as I recall; I believe the last major advance was done by an Italian chap in '92. Even SLIME and Common Lisp were quite well passed up by these capabilities. Most of those advances took place in the Lisp and Prolog world. I infer that this was due to the symbolic execution capabilities which the Fortran/Algol families have disavowed. So it's always nice seeing advances in the industrial art come out, but a little wistful, knowing what once was.