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Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2001 15:25:00 -0000
From: Michael Snyder <msnyder@cygnus.com>
Organization: Red Hat
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To: Jason Merrill <jason@redhat.com>
CC: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com, gcc@gcc.gnu.org
Subject: Re: [RFA/stabs reader] Fix v3 duplicate constructors problem
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Jason Merrill wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com> writes:
> 
> >> What does GDB actually use the member function information for?  What
> >> impact would this change have, other than the output of ptype?
> 
> > Right now, the big thing is probably member function calls.  If the
> > constructor is called from GDB, we want to get the complete object
> > constructor.  I'm not 100% sure this is even possible, though.
> 
> You can't call a constructor directly in C++; no reason to allow it from
> GDB. 

OTOH, there are a lot of things that you can do from GDB
that you cannot do programmatically.  Accessing private data
would be an example.  Since GDB can call any other function, 
is there a strong reason why it should not be able to call
the constructors?  

If constructors are a special case type of function which 
GDB cannot call, we ought to document that fact.