Ada Mode Intro (Debugging with ROCGDB)

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#### 15.4.10.1 Introduction

The Ada mode of ROCGDB supports a fairly large subset of Ada expression syntax, with some extensions. The philosophy behind the design of this subset is

- That ROCGDB 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 ROCGDB).
- That type safety and strict adherence to Ada language restrictions are not particularly important to the ROCGDB user.
- That brevity is important to the ROCGDB 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, ROCGDB 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 ROCGDB comment (‘`#`’) still works at the beginning of a line in Ada mode, but not in the middle (to allow based literals).