Re: feature idea: type nicknames

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

> We looked into this particular sub-problem a little.  Our idea was
> that it would be nice if "ptype x" showed exactly what the user wrote
> in the declaration of "x".

Yes, that's the ideal default.  The "shortest way to say it" heuristic is a
"better than nothing" idea for the default given limitations on what gdb
can/does figure out from the DWARF.  (I think the manually user-added
nicknames would be nice too.  Sometimes what I wrote in the source is a bit
long to use a hundred times in a long debugging session.)

> In the end it seems that GCC usually emits the verbose forms.  I filed
> a gcc bug report about this; but it isn't completely clear that this
> is what we actually want (see last comment):

I don't really follow what that comment says, but I concur that this
qualifies as "isn't completely clear". :-)

> Another idea would be to suppress printing of defaulted template
> parameters by default.  I don't think we've researched that yet.  

Yes, I think that is obviously desireable.

> (I assume we'll get into the usual problems: DWARF still can't represent
> everything, and anyway even if it could, GCC doesn't emit it :-)

Got to push on the stack from one end or the other to make it move.


Thanks,
Roland