Re: Quoting, backslashes, CLI and MI

["Jim Blandy" <jimb@red-bean.com>]

On 2/22/06, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org> wrote:
> In the CLI buildargv and the expression parser are clearly
> incompatible; we'll have to use it only for non-expression
> commands.  Too many languages, et cetera.

That's my feeling too.

> So, some quoting issues there.  For MI, the -gdb-set example in
> the manual is very unfortunate:
>
>   -gdb-set $foo=3

Yeah --- this seems to me to be taking an overloading of "set"
designed to make life easier for humans and carrying it through to a
machine interface, where it's not helpful, and where the ambiguity is
problematic.  I don't think this form of -gdb-set should be (or ever
have been) supported.

> Similar problems apply to the other listed MI commands.  For instance,
> -exec-arguments ARGS; should it take a single string which is then
> split by buildargv into a vector, or should it take freeform text which
> is then split into an argument vector?  Well, right now it takes a
> literal string, since it just passes the text to CLI "set args".
> That's saved as a string and then passed to create_inferior as a
> string, and eventually passed directly to a shell in the fork-child.c
> case.  So, as un-MI-like as it is, I think I'd have to leave this one
> alone for now - it's just too big a can of worms!

You'd have to rework a lot of code to make the quoting happen earlier.