Re: [5.1/mi] SYNTAX CHANGE? - List ``[ ]'' vs ``{ }''

Fernando Nasser
2001-03-21T15:59:00Z

I rest my case :-)

Jim Ingham wrote:
>
> Andrew & Fernando,
>
> Okay, here are Rab's comments about the proposed change to the MI
> interface (Rab Hagy (rhagy@apple.com) is the fellow responsible for the
> Project Builder side of debugging for Apple's IDE.):
>
> > 1) The delimiters for a list should be different from those for a tuple.
> > The output of MI is, basically, a property list. Property lists have
> > been around for a long time and they have different delimiters for
> > tuples and lists.
> >
> > The current situation, in which the same delimiters are used for both
> > lists and tuples, results in stream of MI output which is difficult to
> > inspect "by eye". The parser is a bit more complex than it needs to be
> > because it has to handle the overloading of '{'. As a result, the data
> > structures used to represent a VALUE is not a clean as they could be
> > either.
> >
> > And, I mean this in the nicest way possible, this oversight sticks out
> > like a sore thumb... when I wrote the special-cases in the parser to
> > deal with this obvious error in the grammar, I wondered if MI was
> > really up to snuff.
> >
> > 2) '[' and ']' are the correct delimiters
> > Adding these characters to the grammar does not complicate the parsing
> > of MI output. These are the obvious characters to be used as the
> > delimiters for a list.
> >
> > 3) ``[bp="1",bp="2",bp="4"]'' is incorrect
> > I don't think this example is allowed by the proposed grammar. It
> > should be one of:
> > bps=["1", "2", "4"]
> > [{bp="1"}, {bp="2"}, {bp="4"}]
> >
> > -rab
>
> Jim
> --
> Jim Ingham jingham@apple.com
> Developer Tools - gdb
> Apple Computer

--
Fernando Nasser
Red Hat Canada Ltd. E-Mail: fnasser@redhat.com
2323 Yonge Street, Suite #300
Toronto, Ontario M4P 2C9