Re: wishlist for gdb ....

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at delorie dot com>]

> From: Vardhan Varma <vardhan@cadence.com>
> Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 14:02:30 +0531
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
>  > Please post a list of missing/buggy/wrongly-implemented features in
>  > GDB that can substantiate this sentence.  (FWIW, my personal
>  > experience with dbx leads me to the opposite conclusion.)
> 
>    Well 'the' feature i like in dbx ( and of the thousands of dbx,
> i'm talking of SUNWspro 5.0's dbx ), is that the command line
> interpreter is actually full blown ksh. So i can just do a ls or
> cat, or even run pine fro (dbx) prompt.

What's wrong with GDB's command "shell"?  Instead of typing "cat" or
"ls", you need to say "shell cat" or "shell ls".

> So i can save all breakpoints using 'save -b > bp' and later reset
> them using 'source bp'.

Redirection of output from GDB's commands is indeed missing, and IMHO
would be nice to have (care to implement it?).  But it hardly
justifies putting a full-blown shell into GDB.

> i can even do shell things like a=`print foo+bar`, and later use $a
> etc.

GDB supports that as well, albeit with a different syntax (no
backticks):

	set $a = foo + bar

For more details, see the section "Convenience Variables" in the GDB
manual.

> I can use both program variables and shell variables in expressions

Same in GDB (with GDB's convenience variables instead of shell
variables).

In any case, the missing features can hardly justify an assertion that
GDB is "_very_ limiting".  You only touched a handful of features, and
those features are (IMHO) not the most important ones when debugging a
complex program.