Re: GDB Speak: `inferior' rather than `target'?

Stan Shebs
2002-12-03T14:24:41Z

Andrew Cagney wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In trying to correctly and clearly word some gdb comments (and yes ok,
> and internal doco), I'm left wondering if we should `newspeak' some
> terminology here and use the word `inferior' instead of `target'.

`Inferior' refers specifically to the process being debugged, while
originally
`target' just referred to the system on which the process ran. Things get
confused when you have targets or quasi-targets that can only correspond
to a single inferior. `inferior' is really more Unix-specific than we
like, while `target program' gets too easily shortened to just `target',
thus compounding the confusion.

I haven't seen anybody else mention the real reason to use `inferior';
since it's the program being debugged, and therefore must have bugs,
it's clearly inferior to GDB! :-)

Stan