Objective-C: instance variables out of scope in debugger

Question

I have a superclass and a subclass, both of which define instance variables.

Rough outline of superclass:

/* GenericClass.h */
@interface GenericCla         


        

Answer 1

GDB is not an Objective-C compiler. The compiler knows about things like lexical scope within Objective-C methods, but GDB does not. It does, however, understand local variables.

In Objective-C, every method has an implicit self parameter passed to it when it's called. So when you look at self->str, GDB is interpreting that like it would interpret any other local variable evaluation.

When you try to evaluate str on its own, GDB will look for a local variable called str and, not finding one, reports that it's not in scope. This is not an error; this is the expected behavior.