RE: probing GDB for MI versions

["Dave Korn" <dk at artimi dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 'Bob Rossi' 
> Sent: 06 October 2004 18:05

> Sorry if I was rude here, I am very frustrated.

  It shows.  But seriously, if you have to keep on saying the same thing
over and over again, we're not disagreeing with you just to be contrary,
it's because either _we_ haven't understood the problem, or because _you_
haven't understood the solutions we've proposed.  At that point, there's a
communication difficulty going on, which will not be resolved by simply
repeating the same description over and over getting more angry each time.

> No one has attempted to do what I am trying to do. Write a front end
> that is capable of working with different GDB's.
> 
> If they do do this, I would like to know how they negotiate the MI
> version to talk.
> 
> Again, you seem to be saying that if I generate a parser off of the MI
> output syntax, that I am somehow wrong.

  No, that's not what I'm saying.  I fully accept that you have to know what
version to deal with in order to invoke the correct full parser, and I fully
accept that while in general newer versions are supersets there are also
genuine backwards-incompatibilities that would require different parsing.
It's entirely proper to generate a parser from the MI output syntax.

  The only thing I'm disagreeing is your assumption that there's no way of
determining which MI version to talk without using a full MI parser.  You
can do it MUCH more simply than that.  That's the point which people keep on
having to repeat to you each time you repeat your description of the
problem, because while everyone understands the initial problem, nobody sees
what's wrong with the solutions that have been proposed so far.

> Is this the general feel of the community?

  Well, it's not what I feel, as I hope I've explained patiently above.  I
wouldn't care to speak for the community at large, but I would be surprised
if anyone else felt that it was wrong to generate a parser from the MI
output syntax.  What I feel is wrong is your assumption that a generated
parser is the only possible means of processing plain ascii human readable
text for the purpose of finding and extracting a single integer value.

    cheers, 
      DaveK
-- 
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