During web searching, I found the following comment : Traditional Lisp debugging practices can still be used.
- What are the traditional debugging practices?
- Normally, what tools are used for debugging lisp (with/without emacs)?
I don't know what Bill meant specifically, but IME:
Typically your editor will have a running instance connected to it. You can compile functions immediately to insert them into the running image -- since Lisp has its own compiler, you're just telling the running image to read and compile a small section of text. Or you can run functions directly, to see what they do.
When an exception is thrown (or a condition is signaled, if you're lucky enough to be in a dialect with conditions), the debugger will show you the stack trace and let you decide how to continue.
The major difference between Lisp and other high-level compiled languages is that in Lisp you're basically always writing code with the debugger attached.