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Re: [RFC] Signed/unsigned character arrays are not strings
> > Which GDB behavior is better is a matter of how often each one is
> > convenient and how often it causes trouble. I don't know enough to
> > have an opinion about that, but if neither one is clearly better
> > overall, it would be best to leave GDB the way it was.
>
> For myself, I think the new behavior is clearly better overall, and
> that relatively few packages rely on sign-specified character types
> for strings; that's why I approved Jan's patch. I even proposed an
> extension that I would find even more useful, to suppress the
> single-quoted characters for arrays of signed or unsigned byte
> variables. (No one's commented on that; I'll wait until we decide
> about this one first.)
>
> Do you think that Emacs's behavior - an important GNU application, but
> only one - changes the overall situation? I don't, and I am generally
> opposed to backing this change out.
I'm not sure who you are addressing, but I don't think anyone is saying
Emacs changes the overall situation.
> I believe there are more
> applications which use single byte arrays for numerical data than for
> character data.
That answers the question that we are really asking and justifies the patch.
> We can document how to produce string output more
> clearly in the manual, perhaps?
Yes I think that is important, especially for an incompatible change.
The following could also be updated in the manual:
(gdb) print $xmm1
$1 = {
v4_float = {0, 3.43859137e-038, 1.54142831e-044, 1.821688e-044},
v2_double = {9.92129282474342e-303, 2.7585945287983262e-313},
v16_int8 = "\000\000\000\000\3706;\001\v\000\000\000\r\000\000",
v8_int16 = {0, 0, 14072, 315, 11, 0, 13, 0},
v4_int32 = {0, 20657912, 11, 13},
v2_int64 = {88725056443645952, 55834574859},
uint128 = 0x0000000d0000000b013b36f800000000
}
--
Nick http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob