RE: is systemtap's language more complicated than needed.

["Stone, Joshua I" <joshua dot i dot stone at intel dot com>]

On Wednesday, December 13, 2006 4:33 PM, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> "Stone, Joshua I" <joshua.i.stone@intel.com> writes:
> Indeed, and resolving this problem had been recorded as the goal of
> bug #1570.  Indeed, the issue is complicated by tension between the
> in-probability inline function returns and the compiler's propensity
> to inline things.

Ah, I thought there was a bug on that, but you caught me being too lazy
to go look... :)

>> Perhaps we could implement what you suggest as a shorthand, but
>> still leave the function/inline/statement variants in place to allow
>> one to be explicit. [...]
> 
> Perhaps, though we would be saving just two tokens ("." and "function"
> / "statement" / ...) for each such shorthand use.  Or one could save
> typing effort by supporting explicit abbreviations like "k.stmt(...)"
> for "kernel.statement(...)".

I don't think the current language is all that verbose.  The main value
I see in shortening it is for the benefit of one-liners.

Would it make sense to do this generally and provide some sort of
auto-completion?  For example if I say 'probe foo', and there is no
'foo', but the only possible expansion is 'foobar', it could be
automatically expanded.

Wildcards almost do this, except that auto-completion means to give
exactly one unambiguous match, rather than all matches.


Josh