Re: [RFA] delete BLOCK_SHOULD_SORT

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 01:04:10AM -0700, Paul N. Hilfinger wrote:
> 
> > I think the changes are pretty straightforward, though I'd appreciate
> > it if somebody more conversant with ada-lang.c than I am could make
> > sure I'm not missing anything with my change there.
> 
> David,
> 
> OK; let me explain what Ada is up to in the various places it does
> symbol lookup, and you can decide if we (ahem) need a conversation on
> this (vis-a-vis this thread or the other "dictionary" threads), or if
> our needs introduce no new requirements.
> 
> The problem is that some of our symbol lookups essentially require searches for 
> regular expressions of the form
> 
>     (.*__)?<NAME>(___.*)?
> 
> or for 
> 
>     <NAME>(___.*)?
> 
> Not much you can do about the former, of course, with the current
> setup, except scan all symbols, and that's what we do.  The second
> pattern, however, can benefit for sorted blocks in an obvious way---
> hence the ada-lang.c code you mentioned in an earlier message---but
> doesn't need them.  That is, we take advantage of BLOCK_SHOULD_SORT
> when possible.  I don't have measurements of the impact of not having
> it.  There are obvious ways to use caching when performance becomes a
> problem (and we currently use them).
> 
> The other property of Ada is that when we have to search global or 
> all file-scope symbols, we generally want ALL matches to these patterns, or
> ALL matches from a given block.

Paul, David,

I believe that the right thing to do with this code is actually to
tranform it into calls to search_symbols and let that handle the
details.  We have a regexp symbol matching interface... and it's not
significantly slower, given that almost no symbol tables are sorted now
anyway.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer