Re: Separation into dock widgets

[John Swensen]

On Apr 29, 2011, at 4:50 PM, Jacob Dawid wrote:
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jacob Dawid <address@hidden>
> Date: 2011/4/29
> Subject: Re: Separation into dock widgets
> To: John Swensen <address@hidden>
> 
> 
> John,
> 
> I think we should do a separate Debugger class and do a clean 
> reimplementation (which is of course much faster than to reinvent the thing). 
> I have almost replaced the whole OctaveLink code that is responsible for the 
> variables and the history. All that is left from octave_server is the 
> for-loops that handle copying from one list to another :P There is still an 
> inconsistency regarding the variables and the history: Variables get returned 
> as a whole list, history just returns the last changes.
> 
> Jacob
> 

Jacob,
I also noticed that in your reimplementation of the some of the functionality 
of fetching variables that you are actually doing a deep copy of the whole 
symbol table at the current scope.  Maybe those that know the Octave internals 
better can correct me, but I think this is a really bad idea for memory 
reasons.  If someone has a very large matrix and you do a deep copy, I think it 
will duplicate all the contents of the variables and it is an unnecessary 
duplication of memory usage.  That is the reason that in the original 
octave_server class I simply had it transferring the variable name, type, size, 
and some other info from Octave to the IDE and there was a mechanism for the 
user of the octave_server class to get the full contents of a specific variable 
if explicitly requested.

John Swensen