/*******************************************************************************

 * Copyright (c) 2009 Wind River and others.

 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials

 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0

 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at

 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html

 * 

 * Contributors:

 *     Wind River (Ted Williams) - initial API and implementation

 *     IBM (Samantha Chan) - updated documentation, added getSize, subclass from IValue

 *******************************************************************************/

package org.eclipse.debug.core.model;

import java.math.BigInteger;

import org.eclipse.debug.core.DebugException;

/**

 * <code>IMemoryAddress</code> represents the value of an address in memory. 

 * 

 * This interface is introduced to allow clients to evaluate an expression to an 

 * address without having to create an <code>IMemoryBlock</code>.  To evaluate an 

 * expression to an address, clients are expected to create an <code>IExpression</code>

 * from the expression manager.  If the expression can be evaluated to an address, the returning

 * value of the expression should optionally implement this interface or be

 * able to adapt to an <code>IMemoryAddress</code> object. 

 * 

 * <p>

 * Clients may implement this interface.

 * </p>

 * @since 3.5

 * @see org.eclipse.debug.core.IExpressionManager

 * @see org.eclipse.debug.core.model.IValue

 */

public interface IMemoryAddress extends IValue {

	/**

	 * Returns the value of the memory address as a <code>BigInteger</code>.

	 *

	 * @return a BigInteger representation of the memory address

	 * @exception DebugException if this method fails.  Reasons include:

	 * <ul><li>Failure communicating with the VM.  The DebugException's

	 * status code contains the underlying exception responsible for

	 * the failure.</li>

	 */

	public BigInteger getValueAddress() throws DebugException;

    /**

     * Returns the address size in bytes.

     * 

     * @return the number of bytes required to hold this address. 

     */

	public int getSize();

}