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Re: RFC: Formatting of type output
- From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>
- To: Michael Elizabeth Chastain <mec at shout dot net>
- Cc: gdb at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 15:42:42 -0500
- Subject: Re: RFC: Formatting of type output
- References: <200112061739.LAA11659@duracef.shout.net>
On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 11:39:10AM -0600, Michael Elizabeth Chastain wrote:
> Good morning Daniel,
>
> > Does anything mechanical depend on the format of type output, besides our
> > testsuite?
>
> AFAIK, the white-space changes between v2 g++ and v3 g++ haven't
> caused any external consumers of this information to break in such a way
> that bug reports have reached the gnats database or the gdb mailing
> lists. So I would suspect "no".
>
> > Does anyone have any radically strong feelings about how it
> > should be formatted?
>
> Basically no.
I am going to attempt to print types without the use of the demangler,
then. If I can get it to work adequately, I'll ask again.
> > Similarly, does anyone prefer to have vtbl and vbase pointers explicitly
> > printed?
>
> Are you talking about "ptype *Foo" or "print *pFoo" here?
>
> At my day job, I use cygwin + gcc 2.95.3 + pthreads + gdb,
> and the vtbl pointer is a quick indicator whether a pointer points
> to a sane, live object. That is a case of "print *pFoo".
OK, that does seem useful. Survey of facts and opinions:
- are not part of the explicit data of the class
- vary wildly depending on one's compiler. 2.95 has vbase pointers
only, 3.0 has vtbl pointers only.
- are exceedingly useful to people debugging C++ support or Java
support, but not normally useful to people debugging user code.
I'm going to lean towards option (B) [suppressing them by default and
adding a set flag to show them] when I get around to this. This is at
the bottom of my list though.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer