Re: GUD/GDB in emacs

[Nick Roberts]

Richard G Riley writes:
 > Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz> writes:
 > 
 > >  > > I'm not sure what you mean exactly.  Maybe expand a node in situ in 
 > > the
 > >  > > locals buffer, for example.  
 > >  > 
 > >  > That would seem the obvious solution and is the case in other IDEs. e.g
 > >  > you see "p" in the locals (where p is a pointer to a struct for example)
 > >  > and then can see the struct by double clicking it for example. Pretty
 > >  > much what the speedbar does but without the speed bar.
 > >
 > >
 > > I think Insight does this but ISTR Totalview uses a separate frame.
 > > Expanding
 > 
 > I'm not familiar with these things. They are Emacs packages?

No, they're debuggers.

 > > in situ makes it harder to find the other locals.  In fact I'm
 > > thinking of
 > 
 > Expand, shrink. They only impede if you expand them. If you expand them
 > they are expanded for a reason generally. But as you point out below the
 > vocab we are using (because of what is there) can confuse us. "Watch" in
 > this case is the only apparent way to expand a pointer to a struct. We
 > should really just be discussing how to view a dereferenced pointer -
 > DDD does this quite nicely. But being an Emacs convert it would be nice
 > to have the same, or similar, in the GUD interface.

I've not used DDD much but I found the data window (= watch expressions?)
awkward.  You can view structures in the GUD buffer with "set print pretty"
and the "print" command (also on the tool bar and C-x C-a C-p).

 > > using a separate frame for each watch expression, something which isn't
 > > really possible with the speedbar.  This would be helpful for arrays and
 > > large structures.
 > 
 > A separate frame for each expression would be a collossal waste of
 > screen real estate and possibly worse than the current speed bar
 > implementation IMO.

As you say, they only impede if you expand them.  Data structures can be large
and need their own frame/window.  It would also be a way to limit the number
of children that need to be created.


-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob