[m-rev.] diff: fix failure of debugger/declarative/browse_arg

Mark Brown mark at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Wed Jun 7 11:28:50 AEST 2006


On 07-Jun-2006, Ian MacLarty <maclarty at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> The various pretty printers and their format options seems to have grown
> organically and without a common intended consistant behaviour. 
> I'm not sure having different format options for print, print-all and
> the browser makes a whole lot of sense,

Right or wrong, that was a deliberate design decision, IIRC.  The rationale
was along the lines of print-all needing to be more limited so that values
could fit onto one line (since there will be multiple values printed),
whereas print can afford to use more lines.  Likewise, different parameters
make sense for the different formats, since they wouldn't necessarily
require the same space to show the same information.

The intent was that users who don't want to think in this detail can just
omit the -APBfpv options, whereupon they should get consistent behaviour.

Whether this has proven to be the right choice I can't say, since my .mdbrc
just contains

	format_param depth 10
	format_param size 60

and I don't make use of different parameters for different modes/formats.

> especially in the context of the
> declarative debugger.

There may have been some confusion as to whether the declarative debugger
should be considered to be like "print" or "browse".  I don't recall if a
final decision was ever made.  Perhaps we should have made the declarative
debugging output a fourth mode, with its own parameters?

Cheers,
Mark.

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