[boost] Re: io operations for stl containers?

From: Jason House (jhouse_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-02-26 10:48:41

Terje Slettebø wrote:
> 
> >From: "Jason House" <jhouse_at_[hidden]>
> > I would suspect that chars don't get output with '' around them...
> 
> Right. I was just thinking C++ code, here. :)
> 
> > Is there even a way to specify/change that?
> 
> It isn't currently, as the fundamental types aren't handled as composite
> types, and therefore aren't formatted using any set format. Also, it seems
> it may not be possible in an obvious way.
> <snip>
> It appears to prefer the operator<<(char) stream member function, to this
> free function, as it isn't called when doing "std::cout << 'A';".

:(
It would be a good question to figure out why that won't work, and how
to fix it...  What happens, in general, if somebody want to override a
stream operator to do something else?  String output probably uses
character output by default... it would be very bad to have a system
that made the string "string" (no quotes) output as 's''t''r''i''n''g'

> > :(
> > Debugger friendly manipulation would be good.  I still haven't thought
> > about how exactly outputting of an arbitrary composite variable will
> > work in the debugger by default...  I agree that having a wrapper makes
> > it easy for the output formatting of general types, but actually being
> > able to execute "std::cout << my_suspect_variable" in the debugger
> > without premeditation still poses a significant problem.  Why can't bugs
> > be predicted before you notice them?
> 
> You're right, good point. Would it be possible to get some information on
> what kind of functions, if any, may be called in e.g. your debugger? From
> this, we may find what we can do.

Well, I personally haven't gotten into the habit of calling functions
for any debugger.  I know that gdb allows that... and last that I tried
it under the cygwin port, it wasn't very stable (but I kind of expect
that in a cygwin port).  I do also remember hitting trouble trying to
call templated types.  I believe that it could make calls to templated
functions, but you needed to know the "real" name for the function... 
The base function name plus extra characters in order to distinguish
it...  I might have gotten the "real" name off the call stack or
something like that...

Does that help to define "my debugger"?  I would hope to make it work
for as many debuggers as possible (provided that they at least support
making function calls)