12.4.6.5 Known Peculiarities of Ada Mode

Besides the omissions listed previously (see section Omissions from Ada), we know of several problems with and limitations of Ada mode in No value for GDBN, some of which will be fixed with planned future releases of the debugger and the GNU Ada compiler.

• Currently, the debugger has insufficient information to determine whether certain pointers represent pointers to objects or the objects themselves. Thus, the user may have to tack an extra .all after an expression to get it printed properly.
• Static constants that the compiler chooses not to materialize as objects in storage are invisible to the debugger.
• Named parameter associations in function argument lists are ignored (the argument lists are treated as positional).
• Many useful library packages are currently invisible to the debugger.
• Fixed-point arithmetic, conversions, input, and output is carried out using floating-point arithmetic, and may give results that only approximate those on the host machine.
• The type of the 'Address attribute may not be System.Address.
• The GNAT compiler never generates the prefix Standard for any of the standard symbols defined by the Ada language. No value for GDBN knows about this: it will strip the prefix from names when you use it, and will never look for a name you have so qualified among local symbols, nor match against symbols in other packages or subprograms. If you have defined entities anywhere in your program other than parameters and local variables whose simple names match names in Standard, GNAT's lack of qualification here can cause confusion. When this happens, you can usually resolve the confusion by qualifying the problematic names with package Standard explicitly.