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From: Bradford Chamberlain <brad@cs.washington.edu>
Subject: QUERY: pretty-printing C++ classes
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Date: 06 Mar 2002 21:43:56 -0800


I am curious whether gdb has hooks that would allow me to provide ways
of pretty-printing C++ classes without modifying its sources.  For
example, imagine that I am supplying you with a C++ class library, and
want to save you the hassle of inspecting the guts of my classes and
understanding their inner workings when debugging your C++ code that
uses them.  Rather, I'd like to cause "p instanceOfMyClass" to supply
you with a clean view of the class that doesn't require understanding
its implementation.

One way to do this would be to hack the source, perhaps treating my
library as a new language.  However, I'd like to avoid changing the
gdb source both for simplicity and so that I don't have to ship you a
new copy of gdb.  So is there another way that I can hook my pretty
printing in?  For example, I could imagine that a well-defined method
name or operator<< overload might be utilized by gdb if it exists.  Or
that perhaps I can give you a .file that will be used at load time to
configure the behavior.

Any information on whether such a feature exists, or other possible
workarounds would be appreciated.

Thanks very much,
-Brad Chamberlain