I'm debugging a complicated C++ program this week. It used a lot of STL containers, such as stl::map. To print the content of stl::map in GDB-7.x with Python pretty-printing enabled. I got error message like this. My original thought was it might be a bug in GDB, so I upgraded it to the latest version. But the error remained. Without pretty-printing, debugging C++ program is really a PITA. So I had to stop my work at hand and searched for solution online. After I read this bug report, I realised that it was due to the bug in GCC. I did a simple test as mentioned in the bug report and found out that program compiled with GCC-4.5.0 would mess up the pretty-printing in GDB. After installing the lastest GCC-4.5.3, everything was OK.