improving debugging experience ;)

[Christian Parpart]

Hi,

((well, I'm shy, though don't wanna open up a bug report on it that soon))

At work, I'm supposed to develop on VS.NET 2005 and I must say, 
that it has for sure lots of good development/debugging 
advantages over KDevelop.

Idea 1)

While in debugging mode, you're able to hover a symbol and get it's
data dump, just like an item in the "Variables View", however, 
it is comprehensivily splitted up into a tree-alike popup stacked down
to just where your hover the next symbol within this popup.

While this is quite handy, there still is another thing I'm missing.

In C#/.NET each and every little object has a common base class even called 
object, having a virtual function called toString() making it possible,
that the debugger is able to use this function to pretty print the 
output of a variable's object::ToString() instead of the raw data.

Of course, in C++ you simply have no really common base class, in fact, we're 
having several frameworks and each and everyone calls is base class 
different, not to mention: TObject/QObject/CObject/Object/....

So now my idea is that KDevelop would just examine the data structure of a 
variable. If it hits a certain base class FOO containing a certain function 
BAR, then this one gets invoked and its return value is used for the pretty 
display.
FOO and BAR shall be (of course) configurable, only one BAR per FOO and 
multiple type of FOOs.

So in the end, I'm not a kdevelop coder, and yet, I'd like to have really this
feature in *somehow*.

Is this even possible from a kdevelop/gdb technical point of view?

Best regards,
Christian Parpart.
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