RE: [RFC] syntax change for "record save"

["Jakob Engblom" <jakob@virtutech.com>]

> > This proposal follows from Teawater's thread
> > "A question about gdb script", in which Teawater
> > wants to know how to use a gdb local variable
> > to append a sequence number to the file name
> > of a record log file.
> 
> This is not an objection, but I am really not fond of that extension.
> It feels ad hoc that the extension, if provided, should be evaluated
> as an integer. What if the user wanted a more general scheme? Or what
> if he wanted to the suffix to be in hex?
> 
> If I were Teawater, I'd probably look at writing a python script
> rather than a GDB script.  In particular, it's easy to compose the
> right CLI command from python using:
> 
>     (gdb) python gdb.execute("rec save file.%d" % 1)
> 
> You can replace the "1" above by an python variable, including
> one obtained by evaluating an expression as a long.

To take some input from a different (commercial, closed-source, if someone asks)
tool with a similar interface of script + Python, in Simics, we solve that by
having our CLI (quite similar to gdb in many ways) be able to construct strings.


So we would do something like this:

simics> save ("file." + $a)     

(when the first argument to + is a string, the next argument is forced to a
string)

Or

Simics> save ("file.%d" % [$a])  ## Support for Python-style % operator in CLI

I think supporting string generation would solve many more problems easily. 

The save name INDEX to me seems silly, if you are doing this manually, why don't
you just type a different name each time?


Best regards,

/jakob

_______________________________________________________

Jakob Engblom, PhD, Technical Marketing Manager

Virtutech                   Direct: +46 8 690 07 47   
Drottningholmsvägen 22      Mobile: +46 709 242 646  
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Sweden
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