I'm probably showing my age when I write this (I was born in the late 50's), but the Perl debugger is fine for me -- but then, I've used a variety of debug monitors and IDEs in my career, this one just has a variety of different commands for the same things that I want to do.

I use the debugger for small things I want to try out, and occasionally for tracking down a more complex problem. That's my way of saying it might be faster (with regard to your two points about line continuations and readline support suggest that) just to write a one-time script and step through it in the debugger.

As far as learning you have to type print $x or x $x, I'm guessing you haven't spent that much time useing the debugger. If you had, you'd know how to

• set a breakpoint (b);
• run (c);
• step through code (n);
• step down into a function (s);
• dump values (x); and
• quit (q).

Once you've got those basics down, you can get into more esoteric things, such as running until a variable is equal to a specific value, clearing breakpoints (B, I think) and so forth.

If you're keen to improve the Perl debugger, remember, this is open source -- feel free to jump in and help out.