Re: [RFC/RFA?] Should break FILE:LINENO skip prologue?

Daniel Jacobowitz
2008-01-12T17:58:43Z

On Sat, Jan 12, 2008 at 06:57:39PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:18:03 +0100 (CET)
> > From: Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>
> > CC: gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> >
> > > "*FUNCTION" is generally not a useful C expression, unless FUNCTION
> > > returns a pointer. So I don't want to rely on the user to guess this
> > > magic in GDB.
> >
> > Actually *FUNCTION is a perfectly valid C expression
>
> I didn't say it's invalid; I said it was not useful. That is, a
> casual C programmer is unlikely to think about such an expression.

I suggest you not think of *FUNCTION as dereferencing FUNCTION.
That's not what the * means here. * means "what follows is an
expression in the current language; evaluate it as an address and
break there". In C, a function evaluates to its address (technically,
decays to a function pointer). The * is not part of the expression.

In Ada, as Joel said, this is not true. *FUNCTION won't work, because
the * means "an expression follows" and the name of a function taking
no arguments means to call the function. The * is language
independent in this context.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery