Hi,

In a 2009-08-02 commit, Donal added an interesting debugging tool:

   ::tcl::unsupported::representation

with the comment:

   Result string is deliberately a bit obstructive so that people are
not encouraged to
   make code that depends on it; it's a debugging tool only!

Of course I'm delighted to get a sharp knife when I can... however I'm
a bit surprised by this, in the light of an earlier discussion on this
list more than one year ago (2008-06-03, subject: "debugobj"),
regarding a similar patch I had proposed
(::tcl::unsupported::debugobj) at

  https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1980917&group_id=10894&atid=3108
94

To summarize the differences:

  - 'representation' just gives the type name, as a string result in a
trivially parseable English sentence.

  - 'debugobj' also gives refcount, along with object and intrep
pointers, on stdout so as to be a bit harder to depend on. Knowing the
refcount can be very helpful to play with the K combinator and various
in-place optimizations, and knowing the pointers helps tracking
duplication at the Tcl_Obj and intrep levels.

At the time of the discussion, the consensus was that (1) all this was
done by Tweezer, why reinvent the wheel, and (2) too sharp a knife.
Why, then, end up with an even sharper knife with less introspective
power ?

-Alex

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