mingw/info/gdb/Summary.html

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  19 <h2 class="unnumbered">Summary of GDB</h2>
  20
  21    <p>The purpose of a debugger such as GDB is to allow you to see what is
  22 going on "inside" another program while it executes--or what another
  23 program was doing at the moment it crashed.
  24
  25    GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of
  26 these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
  27
  28      <ul>
  29 <li>Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
  30
  31      <li>Make your program stop on specified conditions.
  32
  33      <li>Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
  34
  35      <li>Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the
  36 effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
  37 </ul>
  38
  39    <p>You can use GDB to debug programs written in C and C++.
  40 For more information, see <a href="Support.html#Support">Supported languages</a>.
  41 For more information, see <a href="C.html#C">C and C++</a>.
  42
  43    <p>Support for Modula-2 and Chill is partial.  For information on Modula-2,
  44 see <a href="Modula-2.html#Modula-2">Modula-2</a>.  For information on Chill, see <a href="Chill.html#Chill">Chill</a>.
  45
  46    <p>Debugging Pascal programs which use sets, subranges, file variables, or
  47 nested functions does not currently work.  GDB does not support
  48 entering expressions, printing values, or similar features using Pascal
  49 syntax.
  50
  51    GDB can be used to debug programs written in Fortran, although
  52 it may be necessary to refer to some variables with a trailing
  53 underscore.
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  57 <li><a accesskey="2" href="Contributors.html#Contributors">Contributors</a>:                 Contributors to GDB
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