from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
source-level debugger
<programming, tool> A {debugger} that shows the programmer the
line or {expression} in the {source code} that resulted in a
particular {machine code} instruction of a running program
loaded in memory. This helps the programmer to analyse a
program's behaviour in the high-level terms like source-level
{flow control} constructs, {procedure} calls, named
{variables}, etc instead of machine instructions and memory
locations. Source-level debugging also makes it possible to
step through execution a line at a time and set source-level
{breakpoints}.
In order to support source-level debugging, the program must
be compiled with this option enabled so that extra information
is included in the executable code to identify the
corresponding positions in the source code.
A {symbolic debugger} is one level lower - it displays symbols
(procedure and variable names) stored in the executable but
not individual source code lines.
{GDB} is a widely used example of a source-level debugger.
(2007-04-03)