I'll make a wild stab here. There are three kinds of debugger. One
works the JVM level, each step is a byte code instruction or a line of
Java code.   It can thus display java variables with their names and
values with the proper type. This is how the Eclipse debugger works.

one works at the machine code level, where you see registers, control
blocks and native machine code.  Here you can do very fine
breakpoints, e.g. in the middle of an expression. the greybeards among
us will remember debugging with Periscope this way.

A third works at the C/C++ level somewhere between for debugging JNI
code. It is working at the machine code level, but has a map of C
source code lines to various spots in the machine code so it can
display roughly the corresponding code.  It has a symbol table, but
the symbol table has no concept of type, so everything is presumed
decimal or hex. To use this sort of debugger you must be familiar with
both C and assembler

Perhaps you are being given the option of implementing any combination
of the three levels.