Re: RFA/symtab: Let search_symbols find exact matches

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 01:15:21PM -0800, David Carlton wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 15:25:06 -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com> said:
> 
> > There are like a million ways in GDB to find a list of symbols.  Me,
> > I think that's a recipe for suffering.  They're all subtly
> > different.  I want the same set of symbols considered for overload
> > resolution and tab completion, and there's no reason that this
> > should be different from the results of "break".  I intend some day
> > to condense them all.
> 
> Yup.  I'm just nervous about this for a couple of reasons:
> 
> 1) If functions try to handle too many situations, they get ugly; I'm
>    still in recovery from trying to deal with find_overload_match, for
>    example.  On the other hand, duplicated code is ugly, too.  And
>    we're programming in C, which limits our options.  I don't know how
>    to best resolve this tension in this particular case; I doubt I'll
>    be thrilled with whatever outcome we end up with.  (Unless cleaning
>    this mess takes long enough that we end up porting GDB to C++
>    first, though even that would only go so far in this instance.)

I am seriously considering raising the C++ issue again.

> 2) I don't understand search_symbols yet; it's a lot messier than
>    make_symbol_overload_list.  Based on some reading of the code and
>    on my experience with cleaning up lookup_symbol_aux, I expect that
>    much of that messiness doesn't need to be there.  I'd be happier if
>    somebody (you, me, some other foolhardy person who wants to be
>    initiated into the mysteries of GDB's symbol-management "logic")
>    cleaned up search_symbols first.  That way, we could have an
>    informed opinion about the differences between search_symbols and
>    make_symbol_overload_list before merging them.  (And I suspect that
>    the differences would shrink over the course of that cleanup,
>    making the merge easier.)

Some of that messiness definitely is going to go away, it's on my hit
list.  But I don't feel like doing it right this moment :)

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer