NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Breakpoint

A breakpoint, in software development, is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring knowledge about a program during its execution. During the interruption, the programmer inspects the test environment (logs, memory, files, etc.) to find out whether the program functions as expected. Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields. ... A computer program or software program (usually abbreviated to a program) is a step-by-step list of instructions written for a particular computer architecture in a particular computer programming language. ... Debugging is a methodical process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a computer program or a piece of electronic hardware thus making it behave as expected. ... A programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, i. ...

In practice, a breakpoint consists of one or more conditions that determine when a program's execution should be interrupted.

Most commonly, the program's execution is interrupted before a programmer-specified instruction is executed. However, not always does a debugger allow a programmer to specify any instructions because instruction(s) located in branch delay slot are to be executed atomically. Otherwise, branch instruction may not take its effect correctly. A debugger is a computer program that is used to debug (and sometimes test or optimize) other programs which might be running on the same computer (host computer) as the debugger is running, might be running on the target hardware, or might be running on the ISS. When the program... In computer architecture, a branch delay instruction is an instruction immediately following a conditional branch instruction which is executed whether or not the branch is taken. ...

Other kinds of conditions, such as the reading, writing, modification of a specific area in memory, or at a particular time, or upon a keystroke, are also used.

Breakpoint (demo party) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (779 words)
	Breakpoint is the successor to the legendary Mekka and Symposium.
	Breakpoint 2004 saw a major change in the funding of the party: ATI Technologies became the main sponsor of the event, and apart from the lucrative prizes, offered various other features to the party, such as seminars and workshops, and also sponsoring a helicopter flight for willing visitors over the hills of the Rhine-region.
	Breakpoint 2005 caused some sad moments to the demoscene when it was announced that the military depot was scheduled to condemnation by the German government, and the next edition was scheduled to be held in the city's gym in the middle of Bingen.

Debug Tutorial: How to Set a Breakpoint (494 words)
	Breakpoints force execution of a program to stop at points of interest to allow examination of data, registers, stack, and message queues.
	A data breakpoint, which is referred to here as a watchpoint, is placed on a data address.
	The breakpoint or watchpoint is only reported when the condition evaluates to True.

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