Re: GUD octave support

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Dec-2007, Nick Roberts wrote:

| 
|  > | which is matched by a regexp in Emacs.  I think that Octave should be 
able
|  > | to emit the same information, i.e., something like:
|  > | 
|  > | Z^Z/home/nickrob/octave/example.m:4
|  > 
|  > Sorry, but I'm not sure I follow exactly waht it is you want Octave to
|  > do here.  Instead of making analogies with gdb, how about showing
|  > precisely what Octave should do?
| 
| I'm not familiar enough with Octave to say precisely what it should do.  I was
| trying to interpret what Daniel's referenced patch required from Emacs.  This
| patch uses on gud-octavedb-marker-regexp given by:
| 
| (setq gud-octavedb-marker-regexp
|       "keyboard: stopped in\s\\(.*\\)\sat line \\([0-9]+\\)")
| 
| which presumably matches output from Octave in some context.  It appears that
| the filename that matches the first part is only a relative name as the patch
| goes to some trouble to find the full pathname for the file.  It seemed to me
| it would be easier, and more robust, if Octave provided this information for
| Emacs.  So instead of:
| 
| keyboard: stopped in example.m at line 4
| 
| something like:
| 
| Z^Z/home/nickrob/octave/example.m:4
| 
| This would enable Emacs to find and display the relevant file in a buffer with
| an arrow pointing to the given source line when Octave stopped.
| 
| Normally a user would want the Octave's current behaviour, so this would only
| be provided when Octave was invoked with the "--fullname" option.
| 
| Does that provide a clearer picture?

I think users would be surprised to see Z^ZFILENAME, or are you
suggesting that this is an optional output format, not the one used
for interactive users of Octave?

In any case, with the current version of Octave, I see the following
(for example):

  octave:1> dbstop plot 1
  ans =  181
  octave:2> plot
  plot: line 181, column 7
  isscalar
  keyboard: stopped in /usr/share/octave/2.9.17/m/plot/plot.m at line 181

so isn't that already sufficient information for GUD?

|  > Also, I suspect that to be really useful inside Emacs' GUD mode,
|  > Octave's debugging capabilities will need some improvement.  It would
|  > be helpful to have someone who could work on that project.
| 
| What other capabilities do you have in mind?

We need Matlab compatible implementations of all of the following
functions:

  dbclear       Clear breakpoints
  dbcont        Resume execution
  dbdown        Change local workspace context when in debug mode
  dbquit        Quit debug mode
  dbstack       Function call stack
  dbstatus      List all breakpoints
  dbstep        Execute one or more lines from current breakpoint
  dbstop        Set breakpoints
  dbtype        List M-file with line numbers
  dbup          Change local workspace context
  debug         List M-file debugging functions

jwe