[m-rev.] for review: printing higher order values and typeinfos in the debugger

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On 22-Feb-2002, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> The changes to io.m should be mentioned in the NEWS file.

I agree, but should we also mention mdb's new print_optionals command?

> I don't think type_ctor_infos are a non-canonical type, are they?

They are, for the same reason type_infos are: the type constructor may specify
an equivalence, so map/2 and tree234/2 are the same constructor.

> > Index: trace/mercury_trace_vars.c
> >  static	MR_TypeCtorInfo
> > +MR_trace_always_ignored_type_ctors[] =
> >  {
> > +	/* we ignore these until the debugger can handle their varying arity */
> >  	&mercury_data_type_desc__type_ctor_info_type_desc_0,
> >  	&mercury_data_type_desc__type_ctor_info_type_ctor_desc_0,
> 
> These should not be ignored; they are useful to the user, and if
> std_util__deconstruct can't handle them, that is a bug which should
> be fixed.
> 
> So at very least there should be an XXX with that comment.

I thought the comment already implied what you said. However, the right fix
is not to make the debugger handle those types in their existing definitions;
it is to make those type proper Mercury types, along the lines of the
Mercury-defined type_info and type_ctor_info structures I showed you a week
or two ago.

I will send a relative diff addressing these issues, and the others you raised,
later today.

Zoltan.
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