Re: MI: type prefixes for values

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 09:25:42PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:04:18 -0500
> > From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> > Cc: Vladimir Prus <ghost@cs.msu.su>, gdb@sources.redhat.com
> > 
> > To correct the record, he's not parsing MI here.  He's parsing the
> > value encapsulated within MI, the bit in quotes here:
> >     value="4000"
> > or:
> >     value="{int (int)} 0xffffffff <sym>"
> 
> I understood that part.
> 
> > There's no grammar describing what goes in the value string.
> 
> How do you mean ``there's no grammar''?  Do you mean it cannot be
> written?  Or do you mean it was not written yet?  If the latter, then
> if I needed to write a code to parse this, I'd write down a formal
> definition of what I'll expect, before writing code to parse that.

I mean that there's no documented grammar, which in turn means (among
other things) that GDB doesn't guarantee its contents as part of a
stable interface.  Parsing it is a bad idea; either it's opaque, or it
isn't.

Writing a grammar for it would be difficult-to-impractical.  For
functions, it could be any C function type; for arrays, it could be
a list of anything GDB considers a value.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery