Re: [RFA] candidates for ambiguous command in upper case

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

On 01/11/2017 05:25 PM, Yao Qi wrote:
> On 17-01-10 17:00:28, Pedro Alves wrote:
>> On 01/10/2017 03:28 PM, Simon Marchi wrote:
>>> On 2017-01-10 10:19, Jerome Guitton wrote:
>>>> Yao Qi (qiyaoltc@gmail.com):
>>>>
>>>>> IMO, there is nothing wrong.  There is no command starts from "EX".
>>>>
>>>> This is a bit weird to accept upper-case EXEC-FIL then... isn't it?
>>>>
>>>> (gdb) exec-fil
>>>> No executable file now.
>>>> (gdb) EXEC-FIL
>>>> No executable file now.
>>>
>>> I agree that if GDB accepts commands in upper case, the ambiguous
>>> command message should work accordingly.
>>
>> Agreed.  I thought that the manual mentioned that gdb accepts
>> commands in either case, but I can't find it now.
>>
> 
> I don't find gdb accepts commands in either case in the manual, and
> I am surprised that gdb does so.  Actually, gdb does so since 1988!

I guess I probably discovered it by typing some command with
Caps Lock on by accident, and seeing it work.

I can only guess on original motivation -- maybe to make GDB usable
with uppercase-only terminals?  Those were common at some point in
the past.  I think Linux's terminal subsystem might still have
support for those.   But then symbol searching was not case-insensitive,
("set case-sensitive off" support was only added much later), so I
can't quite imagine how that'd be much usable.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves