Once upon a time in a bright little coding lab, there lived a curious young inventor named Zara. Zara loved building things. One day, she built her favorite creation yet: Zobo the Robot — a cheerful helper robot with shiny eyes and a big heart.

Zobo could talk, walk, wave, and even dance! But suddenly… Zobo’s arm stopped moving!

“Oh no!” Zara gasped. “Why isn’t Zobo waving like before?”

Zara scratched her head. “Hmm… maybe there’s a mistake in the code. Maybe I made a bug.”

Now, don’t worry — this wasn’t the kind of bug that flies and buzzes. In the world of programming, a bug is just a little mistake in your code that causes things to go wrong.

Zara knew exactly what she needed to do. She put on her detective hat and pulled out her favorite tool: 🔎 pdb – Python’s Debugger!

🛑 Putting a Stop Sign in the Code

Zara looked through her code and said, “I’ll tell the program to pause right before Zobo tries to move his arm. That way, I can check what’s happening.”

She typed:

breakpoint()

This was like putting a big red STOP SIGN in the program. “Stop right here!” she told her code.

🕵️‍♀️ Entering Detective Mode

The moment Zobo’s code reached the breakpoint(), the program froze.

🧠 “Program paused. What would you like to do?” asked the debugger.

Zara smiled. She was now inside a debugging shell, where she could ask questions and peek inside her code like a spy!

She asked,

print(arm_position)

“Oh! The arm is stuck at 'down' instead of 'up',” she realized. “Now I know why it’s not waving!”

⏭️ Taking Small Steps

Zara typed:

n

This means “next” — take one step forward in the code, but don’t go deep into functions. She followed the trail, line by line.

When she saw a line that called a helper function (like move_arm()), she wanted to see what was inside it. So she typed:

s

That stands for “step” — now she could walk right into the function and watch it work, line by line.

🟢 Continue or 🚪 Quit

When she found the mistake (a wrong variable name!), she fixed it. Then, she wanted the program to run as usual, so she typed:

c

And if she ever wanted to stop debugging completely, she just typed:

q

Zara smiled, ran her program again, and guess what? Zobo waved cheerfully! 🖐️🎉

“Debugging is like solving a mystery,” she said. “And with pdb, I’m the smartest detective in town!”

🧠 Review Time: Let’s Be Debug Detectives!

  1. 🧠 What is a bug in programming?
  2. 🛑 What Python command do you use to pause your program and start debugging?
  3. 👣 What does the command n do inside the debugger?
  4. 🕳️ What does the command s do, and when would you use it?
  5. 🧹 How do you tell the debugger to continue running the program normally?
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