Interesting, I'm halfway between - I never use the perl debugger, but I use gdb extensively for debugging C programs (often perl itself).

One difference is that when I'm looking at C code it's far more likely to be written by someone else, but I still use gdb for my own C code, and print statements for the rare occasions I'm looking into someone else's perl code.

Another part of it is that I tend to find bugs in tools: I got into the habit of using a debugger for C programs to show me the assembler code for each statement, because one of the first C compilers I used had a lot of code generation bugs. When I encounter or suspect a bug in perl, again it's the C-level debugger I turn to, this time because I actually have the opportunity to fix the bug myself.

Conversely, if I were to encounter a bug in gcc code generation and felt brave enough to try and fix it myself, I'd probably use both gdb and sprinkled prints to help me understand the flow.

Hugo