Re: Using XML in GDB?

Paul Koning
2006-01-27T18:41:10Z

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 13:04:29 -0500 From: Daniel Jacobowitz
>> <drow@false.org>

>> ...The biggest win of XML, for me, is that there are standard answers
>> to all of these problems and standard tools for editing and
>> checking XML files.

Eli> Is XML the only widely used standard that supports what we want?

No, it isn't.

You're essentially asking for an easily extensible, flexible
protocol. XML is one of those; it is the extremely verbose end of the
"make it all ASCII" approach used in the Internet for decades. Then
again, the same is true for the existing remote stub protocol.

Another extensible protocol that comes with definition tools and
checkers, but is much more compact, is SNMP. Or, more precisely,
ASN.1 (the definition language) and BER/DER (the encoding rules).

If one of the goals is bit efficiency of the encoding, rather than
maximum verbosity, then ASN.1/DER is far better than XML. Chances are
the implementation would be smaller, too.

Just a thought about a rather different approach to the problem...

paul