Re: Need GDB Ada aware version

["Larry Elmore" <ljelmore@montana.campus.mci.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote in message ...

>P.S. We have seen no problems even in the older version with nested
>procedures/functions, which seem to work fine, so I am not quite sure
>what that is about, but in any case, the important point is that there
>is indeed major work being done on the debugger.


Well, I _thought_ GDB was probably at fault, though I wasn't certain. I use
the 'ddd 2.1' "X" front-end with 'gdb' and apparently the problem lies with
'ddd'. I did some experimenting and 'ddd' definitely gets _very_ confused by
nested procedures/functions and sometimes crashes. I thought 'ddd' was just
a graphical front-end and shouldn't have much to do with such things, but
apparently there's a lot of assumptions built into it. Since I had 'ddd', I
never bothered to learn to use 'gdb' from the command line, but it looks
like I'll have to. I don't need to use a debugger for Ada programs nearly as
often as with C++, but when I do need to use it, I really need it. Usually
because I've got some misconception about some aspect of the language or am
confusing it with some part of another language.

>P.P.S. What is particularly interesting about this new debugger work is
>that we still are using absolutely standard "C" encodings in the debugging
>output, and yet can fully represent the intricacies of complex Ada data
>structures. That's not so easy, these debugging formats were definitely
>not designed with Ada in mind :-)

That _is_ interesting.

Larry