From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14840 invoked by alias); 3 Dec 2002 14:24:41 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 14833 invoked from network); 3 Dec 2002 14:24:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out1.apple.com) (17.254.0.52) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 3 Dec 2002 14:24:40 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (A17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out1.apple.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id gB3EOew22200 for ; Tue, 3 Dec 2002 06:24:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from scv1.apple.com (scv1.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.5) with ESMTP id ; Tue, 3 Dec 2002 06:24:18 -0800 Received: from apple.com (vpn-scv-x4-173.apple.com [17.219.194.173]) by scv1.apple.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id gB3EOcu06201; Tue, 3 Dec 2002 06:24:38 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <3DECBE74.1090407@apple.com> Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 06:24:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Andrew Cagney CC: gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: GDB Speak: `inferior' rather than `target'? References: <3DEBC4AB.9020706@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-12/txt/msg00049.txt.bz2 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