A point in the processing of a program that the programmer wants to observe more closely by stopping the program and examining the contents of variables, buffers and memory. Part of the debugging function, lines of code are marked as breakpoints. When those instructions are about to be executed, the program stops, and control is passed to the programmer. After inspection, the programmer can step through the program one line at a time or cause the program to continue running either to the end, to the next breakpoint or until it crashes, whichever comes first. See watch variable and watchpoint.