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The Watcom Debugger uses the single term breakpoint to refer to the group of
functions that other debuggers often call breakpoints, watchpoints, and
tracepoints.

A breakpoint is traditionally defined as a place in your program where you
want execution to stop so that you can examine program variables and data
structures.  A watchpoint causes your program to be executed one instruction
or source line at a time, watching for the value of an expression to become
true.  Do not confuse a watchpoint with the watch window.  A tracepoint
causes your program to be executed one instruction or source line at a time,
watching for the value of certain program variables or memory-referencing
expressions to change.

In the Watcom Debugger:

 .  Break-on-execute refers to the traditional breakpoint
 .  Break-on-write refers to the traditional tracepoint
 .  A traditional watchpoint is a break-on-execute or break-on-write that is
    coupled with a condition

The Watcom Debugger unifies these three concepts by defining three parts to
a breakpoint:

 .  the location in the program where the breakpoint occurs
 .  the condition under which the breakpoint is triggered
 .  the action that takes place when the breakpoint triggers

You can specify a countdown, which means that a condition must be true a
designated number of times before the breakpoint is triggered.

When a breakpoint is triggered, several things can happen:

 .  program execution is stopped (a breakpoint)
 .  an expression is executed (code splice)
 .  a group of breakpoints is enabled or disabled

In this chapter, you will learn about the breakpoint including how to set
simple breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, and how to set breakpoints that
watch for the exact moment when a program variable, expression, or data
object changes value.