Re: pretty-printing update

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Vladimir" == Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com> writes:

Vladimir> I think the most fundamental difference between your
Vladimir> approach and MI one is that for MI, there's class with one
Vladimir> method to return string rendition, and another method to
Vladimir> return children values.

Yeah.

I'm wondering if there is some generically useful way to wrap the MI
printers in a function suitable for use from the CLI.  I think it
would be ok if this couldn't be done in every case -- it could be a
convenience for the cases where it would work.

That would let library authors implement an MI class and then define
the CLI function simply, something like:

    gdb.pretty_printers[regex] = gdb.functionify_mi_class (class)

I haven't experimented in this area at all yet, this is just a random
idea I had yesterday.

Vladimir> Returning children values, as
Vladimir> opposed to some string names, is very desirable for
Vladimir> MI. OTOH, there's no support to specify names for children,
Vladimir> they are just numbered. Also, for std::map, you probably
Vladimir> would want to return pairs of values and GUI should
Vladimir> understand that mapping is been displayed, I don't know how
Vladimir> to communicate this.

Can't a std::map expose its children as std::pair objects?
Then we'd recursively apply smart MI printing and expose the children
of the std::pair.

Tom