Re: [hatari-devel] Demangle option for gst2ascii & internal Symbol_Load() command

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Thorsten,

On 27.2.2023 11.41, Thorsten Otto wrote:
> Attached are two patches that add support to demangle c++ style symbol names
> directly when loading symbols. For gst2ascii that is only for convenience,
> since the output can also be filtered through m68k-atari-mint-c++filt, but
> that would be hardly possible when directly loading the symbol table from the
> program.

Thanks for the patches, and sorry for not replying to your comment in 
Atari forum!


However, I've already added more generic mechanism for being able to 
autoload demangled symbols in Hatari:
https://git.tuxfamily.org/hatari/hatari.git/commit/?id=e1e4a5bb503d4736caf3d99a4a638535a307d1f8

So I'm a bit hesitant to add large amount of additional code for another 
mechanism to achieve the same.

As to the patch itself, I wonder why '.' "assembly prefix" handling in 
"demangle_it()" is necessary, is somebody really using mangled names in 
m68k assembly?


Currently the main problem with demangled symbols is that they cannot be 
given for debugger commands (e.g. as breakpoints), because debugger uses 
white space as argument separator, which does not work with C++ symbols 
(as they can contain almost any ASCII characters).

I think that should be fixed before adding any additional demangling 
support.


Handling that would require modifying the symbol names during TAB 
completion.  Either by replacing all spaces temporarily with some other 
character (e.g. '@'), which would be ugly, or by auto-quoting the symbol 
names.

Latter would be a better, but it's more work because it also requires 
debugger parsing quoted content correctly, maybe also changing the '"' 
character (currently used to indicate given string needed evaluation 
before being given to debugger).


	- Eero