Re: Need GDB Ada aware version

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Larry said

<<This Ada-aware version of GDB isn't completely Ada-aware. It can't display
the contents of records under some situations, and seems to be totally
confused by nested procedures/functions. Apparently there's going to be a
major improvement sometime in the not-too-distant future, but only the good
people at ACT could tell you when it might become available (it's apparently
being worked on, but that's all I know).>>

The current version of the Ada aware GDB is 3.16.GNAT.1.16, This version
combined with version 3.11 of GNAT provides very close to complete Ada
awareness and can deal with almost all complex Ada data structures. We
are ironing out kinks in this version now with some major customers,
and we are also putting a lot of work into the new GDBTK visual interface.
The result is indeed a major advance, and as always, will be released
publicly at some time in the future, when it is ready.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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.

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 :-)