On Friday, 6 September 2013 at 07:02:56 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
Dynamic arrays are just structs with a length and ptr field.
So when
you invoke '.length' in the debugger you aren't calling a
method, you
are just retrieving the type's field value.
Currently, the only fancy thing the gdb does with D arrays is
that it
pretty prints them. So take for example you have:
{ .length = 5, .ptr = "Hello" };
Rather than printing the dynamic array like the above, it does a
printf("%*.s") style operation to print the contents of .ptr,
but only
as far as .length. This is important because dynamic arrays
are not
expected to be '0' terminated, and you can slice a dynamic
array into
smaller arrays without copying data.
Having the ability to slice D arrays using [] in gdb is
something on
my todo list when I get round to improving gdb for D.
Thanks for the explanation, Iain.
But: Doesn't that mean that myArray[] is just syntactic sugar for
myArray.ptr[i]? And if so wouldn't it make sense to fool gdb,
too, to accept print myArray[4] instead of myArray.ptr[4]?
Funnily btw. "p myArray" prints out the whole array, yet asking
it to print out myArray[3] fails as described.
Thanks also to HS for his hints
A+ -R
