[Tiny-cobol-users] More data types for debugging with gdb.

[Rildo P. <rpr...@ac...>]

Hi,

I think I finished most of the work with the debuggin symbols generation.
Now, if I wanted something better I would be required to make internal
changes at gdb, much documented but not easy to do.  If you want to make
another parser, expression evaluator specific for cobol, iside gdb, please
go ahead.

What's working:
---------------
* you can place breakpoint at every line of the procedure division, the
same with watchpoints.

* you can display seamlessly DISPLAY variables, COMP variables, and to
with a lesser inconvenience, COMP-3. This last is defined as an array of
bytes, so you can only say something like "p/x COMP-3-VAR" to have a
display with the sign encoded (0xC or 0xD hexadecimal characters).

* that variables could be set to another value "set VAR=newvalue", as
expected.

What you cannot do:
-------------------
* referencing array variables (occurs) or variables that need further
qualification (VAR OF PARENTVAR).

* doing calculations in cobol style, as there is no cobol support inside
gdb. (again, if you want... make it!)


The way it is already have many interest, because it single-steps and can
evaluate anything with C-like expressions. If we make some auxiliary C
functions, we can make it more usable without the nightmare of patching
gdb's code.

Please try it. It will make your life easier for writing functions
for the cobol library, or even debugging cobol source.

regards,
 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 Rildo Pragana                 FPGA/uControllers * Linux * tcl/tk
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