Re: GDB Focus Group at the 2008 GCC Summit

Tom Tromey
2008-06-26T00:24:57Z

Tom> Our consensus was to use the function-like syntax (second example
Tom> above) and to parse the arguments as expressions.

I've pushed this to gitorious. Let me know if you run into problems.
(I also pushed a fix for a pretty serious bug in the "python" command,
so we are not exercising this code as much as I'd like... :)

This change defines a new "internal function" type code. A
newly-registered internal function is just a value with this type,
which is assigned to a convenience variable of the given name.

This underscores the need for the gdb.Value class to be much more
robust. Arguments to an implementation of gdb.Function are boxed as
Value objects. (I considered instead unboxing the 'struct value *'s
into ordinary Python values, but I thought that perhaps it would be
valuable for user functions to be able to access types, even types for
scalars.)

I think at the very least we need a way to unbox a Value. Perhaps we
should also implement the full range of numeric operators.

Tom