On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Zachary Turner <divisortheory@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Emil Dotchevski <emildotchevski@gmail.com>wrote:
Also, I think it's useful to at the very least be able to iterate the stack frames and find source/line number information for each call in stack.
Provided I have a function that gets me a string that contains that information, I personally don't have a use case for such iteration. I can't think of what else I'd want to do with this data other than dump it somewhere as text. Can you?
Well, if you're saying that iterating over the frames to get source/line information when the to_string() already contains formatted source/line information is unnecessary since one could implement a parser to extract it, then eh, I'm not sure.
No, I meant that I can't think of a use case for extracting any semantic data from a stack trace.
The main use case I had for knowing source / line information I described in my second post in this thread. In short it allows a more powerful implementation of the __FILE__ and __LINE__ pre-defined compiler macros. If you wanted to provide an overloaded global new/delete to, for example, provide cross platform memory diagnostics then __FILE__ and __LINE__ are insufficient since they would point inside the implementation of the operator. With stack frame iteration your operator new / delete could simply create a stack trace, move backward 1 level, and what you end up with is the equivalent of a __FILE__ / __LINE__ for the previous function, which is the only thing that would be helpful in that case.
Although in most cases knowing how I ended up calling the function is also useful information, I agree that needing to go (possibly constant number) K levels up is a valid use case. I'd still prefer a simpler interface: typedef <unspecified> stack_frame; std::string to_string( stack_frame const & ); class stack_trace { public: stack_trace(); bool empty() const; stack_frame top() const; void pop(); }; std::string to_string( stack_trace const & ); Simple use: std::string s=to_string(boost::stack_trace()); Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode