On Aug 21, 2012, at 5:16 AM, Alex Zavatone <
email@hidden> wrote:
It shows the variable types and memory addresses, but never the things that I actually care about, the values. The "summary" is always empty.
Summaries of object-valued ivars, you mean? The summary is only shown for some known Foundation classes like NSString and NSArray. (I think there may be a way to customize it?) If you want to see the state of an object-valued ivar, flip it open too. It's exactly the kind of recursive inspector you're asking for, I think.
It's stuff like this that make me go WTF, Apple, WTF? Back in 1996, we had features like this in Director and I even wrote my own recursive object inspector
Watch out, you're sounding like an Old Fart. (And I think I'm older than you, so I can say that ;-) Watch out or I'll start waving my walker and ranting about what we used to be able to do in the Smalltalk-80 debugger; and then the other Old Farts will get riled up about ALGOL and the Burroughs B5000 and we'll never get anything done again.
Anyway. I would guess that one reason -description doesn't do this is because GDB's 'print' command already does it by default (if you dereference the pointer, that is.) -description is intended to be more of a compact single-line summary (except of course for collections where it makes sense for it to describe each member.)
—Jens