19.1 Introduction

The package rtrace provides portable tracing facilities for REDUCE programming.¹ These include

• entry-exit tracing of procedures,

• assignment tracing of procedures,

• tracing of rules when they fire.

In contrast to conventional Lisp-level tracing, values are printed in algebraic style whenever possible if the switch rtrace is on, which it is by default. The output has been specially tailored for the needs of algebraic-mode programming. Most features can be applied without explicitly modifying the target program, and they can be turned on and off dynamically at run time. If the switch rtrace is turned off then values are printed in conventional Lisp style, and the result should be similar to the tracing provided by the underlying Lisp system.

To make the facilities available, load the package using the command

load_package rtrace;

Alternatively, the package can be set up to auto load by putting appropriate code in your REDUCE initialisation file. An example is provided in the file reduce.rc in the rtrace source directory.

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