I was amused to just notice that GDB has a -epoch flag, whose sole
purpose is to cause the 'inspect' to print out objects slightly
differently so the Epoch version of GDB mode can try to do something
clever with them.
Given that there hasn't been a new version of Epoch for a decade and
that XEmacs (its descendant, if there is one) doesn't use that flag
currently (I have no idea how long it's been since anybody used that
flag; GNU Emacs doesn't use it currently, either), perhaps the -epoch
flag and the "inspect" command should be deprecated? It wouldn't make
a big difference, but deleting them would allow the inspect_it global
variable to be removed, which is probably a good thing on general
principles.