Debugger : Resolving Name Ambiguity

Resolving Name Ambiguity

Two or more elements may have the same name. For example, the specification might contain an and-state ON with two orthogonal components READING and MONITORING, each of them containing a substate called WAIT. Another example is two events with the same name E defined in two different charts.

Many Debugger commands operate on a group of elements (LIST, SHOW and the different TRACE commands). If such a command is given with a non-unique object name, then it is applied to all the objects with that name.

However, there are commands which expect the argument to be uniquely defined. If these commands are given a non-unique object name, they are ignored and an error message is displayed. To make the reference unambiguous, you can either use the chart name as described above and/or prefix the object’s name with its ancestor(s) name(s) separated by periods, up to a point where the full pathname given is unique.

In our example of the ON state, we could uniquely identify the two orthogonal components in a show state command by entering the following:

Pdb > SHOW STATE reading.wait
Pdb > SHOW STATE monitoring.wait

In another example, to uniquely identify a specific event E, precede it with the name of the chart in which it is defined:

Pdb > SET EVENT chart1:e:=true