[m-dev.] For review: another change to the external debugger

[Fergus Henderson]

On 27-Jul-1998, Erwan Jahier <Erwan.Jahier at irisa.fr> wrote:
> There are 2 parts in this change (1) do not test whether or not an
> attribute is wanted to retrieve it and (2) make the retrieval of
> arguments and other slots done separately. The rationale for (1) is to 
> reduce the average size of the messages sent to the socket.

I suggest adding

	For small fields, it takes less socket traffic to always send
	the value, since it avoids the need to send a `bool' in the
	request and a `maybe(T)' in the response.

Apart from that, this is fine now.

> The rationale
> for (2) is that since arguments slot can be very big, we still want to
> be able to retrieve any slot without retrieving arguments; so we
> retrieve that slot separately.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
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