[Texmacs-dev] How to visualize data structures?

[Salman Khilji]

I spent a couple of hours  today  just  browsing  thru  TeXmacs  source  code.
Unfortunately, in the entire 4 hours, I did not learn even a single thing.

One  of  the  abosolute  MUST  HAVEs  that I  consider  before  attempting  to
understand  existing  code is to  compile it in debug, put a break  point on a
function, and examine and visualize the values of  variables  in a  debugger.  
An  excellent example  would be the  FreeType  project.  Everything  is  
crystal  clear  and visible in the debugger.  Another good example is the 
source code of the gdb debugger itself.   Using the visualization technique, 
I was able to modify gdb to extract its symbol table and output it to a file.


So here is what I was trying to do with TeXmacs:

1)  put a break point on get_env_path(string which, url def).

2)  When I get in there, I want to see what the value of a url is.  So here is
what gdb tells me:

(gdb) p *def.rep->t.rep
$14 = {
  <concrete_struct> = {
    ref_count = 1,
    _vptr.concrete_struct = 0x82bc910
  },
  members of tree_rep:
  op = 137
}



The above to totally  worthless.  The only  member  that I can look at is 'op'
which has a value of 137.  I know I posted  this  question  before,  and David
suggested that going thru the debugger is not recommended and a nice printf is
much  quicker  than  trying to use the  debugger.  But I cannot be expected to
bombard the entire source tree with printf's and recompiling everything I want
to look at something.

Can someone  suggest on how to to look at the  internals  of a TeXmacs  object
efficiently?

This  reminds  of of the  entire  week that I spent on TeXmacs  source  code a
couple of months ago and ended up learning  nothing  whatsoever!  Compare this
to the FreeType project and because  everything is visualizable, I was able to
spend a week on it and add code to it subset Type1 fonts.

Salman