Any better word than "Debugger" for tools like GDB?

I wanted to know if you were aware of any other name for debuggers (I mean, tools like GDB)? debugger sounds to me like something which will remove bugs for you, something like:

but GDB is nothing like that! GDB can

• inspect the memory, read and right each bit of the address-space at your convenience,

• control the CPU, display and change its registers, including the Program Counter which can be jumped anywhere in the code

• understand your high-level source code and match one line/function/variable to its memory 开发者_运维技巧address

• command the CPU to execute a specific function (print malloc(sizeof(int)))

• ... and so many other things ...

all of that has nothing to do 'directly' with bugs, what's why I was wondering if any better world had been coined somewhere?

personally, I like the idea of "software voltmeter and iron-solder", but that's a bit cumbersome !

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That's the most appropriate word for gdb, ever!

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Yeah, what Paddy said, but how about execution inspector?

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From J. B. Rosenberg, How Debuggers Work :

The term debugger is something of a misnomer. Strictly speaking, a debugger is a tool to help to track down, isolate and remove bugs from software programs. [...] In truth, debuggers are tools to illuminate the dynamic nature of of a program -- they are used to understand a program as well as find and fix detects. Debuggers are the magnifying glass, the microscope, the logic analyser, the profiler, and the browser with which a program can be examined. In spite of the limited scope of the term debugger, I will still use this term to describe these software analyzers.

Software analyzer is the king of answer I expected, although it's still simplistic, as described in the quotation above.

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Quoting from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/602138/is-a-debugger-the-mother-of-all-evil/602191#602191:

But in reality, a debugger is used to visualise and hopefully understand the program. That feeds useful information back into the debugging process, but it isn't actually debugging. So maybe if we used the term "visualiser" instead of "debugger", there would be less resistance to using the tool.

RoadWarrior

and in the comments (up-voted trice):

+1 For the "visualising" aspect. Never thought of that. – Oliver Weiler Mar 1 '10 at 12:56