Re: [PATCH:doc] GDB/MI attribute names

[nickrob at snap dot net dot nz (Nick Roberts)]

 > > This patch, slightly paranoid, document the current practice for attribute
 > > names.  I don't want future names to break exiting parsers.
 > 
 > I agree, assuming that what you wrote is factually correct at this
 > point, and that we have no good reasons to modify it VSN.  Is that
 > indeed so?

I can't find any that don't fit the rule that I want to document.  It occurred
to me that the regexp that I was using to parse MI output for Emacs wouldn't
work if certain characters, e.g "$", were used.  I just want to discourage
their use in future attribute names.  Parsers will have to handle existing
anomalies, if any.

 > > + @var{variable} expressions should be alphabetic words or comprise of
 > > + alphabetic words separated by underscores.               ^^^^^^^^^^^
 > 
 > Don't you meant "comprised of"?

Either sounds OK to me.

 > In any case, the text you suggests sounds a bit inaccurate to me.
 > (Maybe I just don't know enough about MI, so please bear with me.)
 > You say "variable expressions", but an expression can use operators,
 > can't it?  If it can, then the operators are not generally alphabetic
 > characters.

No I don't really mean expression.

 @var{variable} names...

would probably work.

 > Based on my understanding of what you meant, I suggest to rephrase as
 > follows:
 > 
 >   Every @var{variable} should be specified as a sequence of alphabetic
 >   characters and underscores.
 > 
 > Does that reflect correctly what you wanted to say?

I'm not sure.  To me, thay're not really variables but a field names (or
attribute names in HTML/XML parlance).  It might mean the value rather than
the name.

How about:

   @var{variable} names should be specified as a sequence of alphabetic
   characters and underscores.

Or say what you would like to see.  I'm not too worried about the exact
wording.  I just want to formalise the output syntax a bit more.


 > Btw, are digit really "verboten"?  If not, replace "alphabetic" with
 > "alphanumeric" above.

I've actually used the [:alnum:] character class in my parser but there are so
few names that I felt that requiring alphabetic wouldn't be restrictive.


-- 
Nick                                           http://users.snap.net.nz/~nickrob