gdb: Ada Mode Intro
15.4.10.1 Introduction
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The Ada mode of GDB supports a fairly large subset of Ada expression
syntax, with some extensions. The philosophy behind the design of this
subset is
* That GDB should provide basic literals and access to operations for
arithmetic, dereferencing, field selection, indexing, and
subprogram calls, leaving more sophisticated computations to
subprograms written into the program (which therefore may be called
from GDB).
* That type safety and strict adherence to Ada language restrictions
are not particularly important to the GDB user.
* That brevity is important to the GDB user.
Thus, for brevity, the debugger acts as if all names declared in
user-written packages are directly visible, even if they are not visible
according to Ada rules, thus making it unnecessary to fully qualify most
names with their packages, regardless of context. Where this causes
ambiguity, GDB asks the user's intent.
The debugger will start in Ada mode if it detects an Ada main
program. As for other languages, it will enter Ada mode when stopped in
a program that was translated from an Ada source file.
While in Ada mode, you may use '--' for comments. This is useful
mostly for documenting command files. The standard GDB comment ('#')
still works at the beginning of a line in Ada mode, but not in the
middle (to allow based literals).
Info Catalog
gdb: Ada
gdb: Omissions from Ada