Debuggers and Debugger Design(Chapter 2 of Gray Hat Python)

The ability to halt a process that is being debugged is achieved by setting breakpoints. By halting the process, you are able to inspect variables, stack arguments, and memory locations without the process changing any of their values before you can record them. Breakpoints are most definitely the mostcommon feature that you will use when debugging a process, and we will cover them extensively. There are three primary breakpoint types: soft breakpoints, hardware breakpoints, and memory breakpoints. They each have very similar behavior, but they are implemented in very different ways.