Identifiers

All languages have a concept of an identifier, composed of letters, digits, and other special characters. The debugger also uses keywords composed of letters; therefore, rules are required to determine which identifiers are actually debugger keywords.

All debugger commands, except examine, begin with leading keywords. Because the examine command begins with an expression, all identifiers must be recognized as such from both the LKEYWORD state that starts commands and the LNORM state that the debugger uses for processing expressions.

Some debugger commands have keywords embedded in them following expressions, and the ends of expressions are hard to recognize. You can use identifiers that have the same spelling as an embedded keyword simply by enclosing the whole expression in parentheses (()). For more information on using keywords within commands, see Keywords Within Commands.

Furthermore, the C and C++ grammars need to know whether an identifier is a typedef or struct/class identifier. The debugger currently makes the determination at the time the whole command is parsed, rather than deferring the determination to when the expression itself is being evaluated. This can result in a misidentification of the identifier.

When in the following four lexical states, the debugger can recognize identifiers:

• LKEYWORD, LNORM, LBPT

  Language	Regular Expression
  C, C++, Fortran	{LT}({LT}|{DG})*

The state is changed to LNORM to process the rest of the expression.
• LSIGNAL

  Language	Regular Expression
  All	{LT}({LT}|{DG})*

   The state is left as LSIGNAL to process the next signal.

If your operating system supports internationalization (I18N), {LT} equates to {LTI18N}.