I agree with what you're saying here. However, when things start getting seriously weird, an assembly language debugger can be invaluable. For example, if your

I agree with what you're saying here. However, when things start getting seriously weird, an assembly language debugger can be invaluable. For example, if your C compiler is generating bad code, or if you've violated some low-level assumption, it's hard to figure out what's going on by inspecting the source code. Sooner or later, the high-level abstractions break, and there's nothing you can do except single-step through the code that's going wrong. I once found a bug in MSVC++ while compiling Quake 2. The compiler was performing a tail-call optimization, but it hadn't noticed that Carmack had stored a pointer to a local variable in a global variable. The stack frame was overwritten while the variable was still live, causing weird stuff to go wrong. This is not the kind of bug that you can quickly find by staring at C code. :-)