Re: [bug-gawk] Gawk debug command 'eval'

[arnold]

Hello.  Thanks for the note.

The debugger was done by someone who left the development team a few
years ago, and I am less familiar with that part of the code base.

That said, I took a quick look, and return from inside code being
run by eval is indeed disallowed. I am not sure why; I suspect it's
to keep someone from trying to run 'return' when not in a function,
but I think it also has something to do with how eval is implemented.
It's essentially done as a function call from within the current
context, so return would cause the eval to finish, and not a
called function.

I will document this limitation, and make a note to see if it can
be worked around at some point in the future.

By the way, your version appears to be unofficial; did you build
it off master?  I generally recommend using just the released versions.

Thanks,

Arnold

Lothar Langer <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> i didn't read anything in the 'Gawk User's Guide' that it is not
> possible to evaluate user defined functions with the command 'eval' in
> the debugger.
>
> Example:
>
> function isnumeric(x) {
>     return (length(x) && x == x+0)
> }
>
> ...
>
> gawk> eval "print isnumeric(\"hello\")"
> error: `return' not allowed in current context; statement ignored
>
> ... but ...
>
> gawk> eval "print length(\"hello\")"
> 5
>
> ... which is expected ...
>
> My version is:
> GNU Awk 4.2.60, API: 2.0