I guess the only time it comes into play is with the STL templates. If there was some way to get the python pretty printer to handle that column, the "whatis" from GDB, then we could just modify the printer, to make it return something nice like just "vector", or "vector of strings", rather than a huge line of gibberish. The user could always look at the code to see what makes up the vector, but in any case, if it was controlled by pretty printer, we could make it do what we want. I haven't been able to figure out if GDB's python can intercept and handle 'whatis'.