Re: GUD octave support

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Dec-2007, Nick Roberts wrote:

|  > Does it even have to be a command-line option?  Could it instead be a
|  > function to call to set the display style for filenames in Octave's
|  > debugging mode?
| 
| It could be a function call.  XEmacs has a mode for Python (another scripting
| language) which uses something called Pdbtrack and looks something like this
| (with a python script called fibo.py and a function called fib):
| 
|   M-x python-shell (note doesn't work with Emacs' run-python)
| 
| Then in the buffer this command creates:
| 
|   Python 2.5.1c1 (release25-maint, Apr 12 2007, 21:00:25) 
|   [GCC 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)] on linux2
|   Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
|   >>> import pdb
|   >>> import fibo
|   >>> pdb.run ("fibo.fib(1000)")
|   > <string>(1)<module>()
|   (Pdb) b fibo.py:5
|   Breakpoint 1 at /home/nickrob/python/fibo.py:5
|   (Pdb) c
|   > /home/nickrob/python/fibo.py(5)fib()
|   -> while b < n:
|   (Pdb) 
| 
| At which point the source appears in a buffer with the overlay arrow pointing
| to the appropriate line.
| 
| This is more lightweight than GUD, and I think that the idea is that the user
| interacts with Python in a shell buffer in the normal way (a bit like he would
| with Octave after run-octave).  Then if he wants to start debugging a script 
he
| can do this just by importing pdb and using pdb.run.
| 
| However, this would require more work in Emacs than just using GUD.

I don't understand this part.  Doesn't the GUD mode of Emacs have to
start Octave?  As part of the initialization, and instead of using a
command-line option, can't it send a command to Octave to set the
special output format?

jwe