Re: Column numbers in stack trace - enhancement request

Sasi wrote:

I filed the following enhancement request to Sun. Would like to hear
opinion about how useful implementing this feature would be.

I don't think it's worthwhile myself. It would require changes (upwardly
compatible, but still changes) to the classfile format. It would require
non-trivial changes to javc to generate the new maps. On the other hand, it
wouldn't give a lot of benefit to most people (who either don't write long
chained sends on one line, or who do use debuggers). I'm not saying that it
would be of no benefit[*], but it seems to me that the costs /of change/
outweigh the benefits.

Note that the costs would not only be born by Sun, but by everyone who writes
compilers or classfile-aware software (which includes me) -- so any time spent
by, say, the Eclipse team keeping up with the (not entirely trivial) changes,
would be time taken from improving Eclipse in other ways.

-- chris

[*] Indeed, it would probably have been better if the debugging information had
always included character offsets. But it didn't :-(


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