Re: -stack-list-locals and children

[Niko Sams <niko.sams@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 10:38, André Pönitz<andre.poenitz@nokia.com> wrote:
> On Monday 29 June 2009 10:13:28 Nick Roberts wrote:
>>  > > -stack-list-locals doesn't return an numchild element. How can the IDE
>>  > > know if a local
>>  > > is has children?
>>  > >
>>  > > If there are children, they are listed in value:
>>  > > ^done,locals=[{name="list",value="QList = {[0] = \"hello\"}"}]
>>  > >
>>  > > Is it a good idea to parse the value with an regular expression to
>>  > > find out if there are children?
>>  >
>>  > It would be really nice if 'type' and 'numchild' information was directly
>>  > included in that "primary" output. The information is available on
>>  > the gdb side, so parsing it from the 'value' field does not really look
>>  > like a good solution in the long run.
>>
>> What would you do with this information?
>
> Use it in a GUI frontend to determine whether the item should be
> expandable or not.
>
>> Note that -stack-list-locals --simple-values _does_ give type information and,
>> if this is presented to the user, he can usually infer the number of children.
>> In the manual:
>>
>>      -stack-list-locals --simple-values
>>      ^done,locals=[{name="A",type="int",value="1"},
>>        {name="B",type="int",value="2"},{name="C",type="int [3]"}]
>>      (gdb)                                             ^^^^^^^
>>
>> C has three children.
>
> Sure I can filter out whatever information is implicitly provided in the output,
> and ask for more if needed. But as roundtrips through gdb are expensive
> time-wise It would be nicer though if all information necessary to build the
> top level of the typical "variable view" could be extracted from gdb in one go.
That would be very nice.

Additionally the arguments could show up in locals too - so
-stack-list-arguments can be skipped.

Niko