Plan for hosted scripting support in OpenOCD
============================================
-Jim Tcl support in OpenOCD currently exists as a patch.
-
-There has been some discussion on the list as to what
-purpose scripting support might serve in OpenOCD.
-
-Also Lua was proposed as a scripting language, but
-only Jim Tcl has been forwarded as a patch.
-
-Tcl is also backwards syntax compatible with OpenOCD
-commands.
What scripting will not do
==========================
language, the choice of language is not terribly important
to those same end users.
+Jim Tcl was chosen as it was easy to integrate, works
+great in an embedded environment and Øyvind Harboe
+had experience with it.
+
Uses of scripting
=================
Default implementation of procedures in tcl/procedures.tcl.
and will have no externally visible consequences.
Tcl has an advantage in that it's syntax is backwards
compatible with the current OpenOCD syntax.
+- external scripting. Low level tcl functions will be defined
+ that return machine readable output. These low level tcl
+ functions constitute the tcl api. flash_banks is such
+ a low level tcl proc. "flash banks" is an example of
+ a command that has human readable output. The human
+ readable output is expected to change inbetween versions
+ of OpenOCD. The output from flash_banks may not be
+ in the preferred form for the client. The client then
+ has two choices a) parse the output from flash_banks
+ or b) write a small piece of tcl to output the
+ flash_banks output to a more suitable form. The latter may
+ be simpler.
+
+
+External scripting
+==================
+The embedded Jim Tcl interpreter in OpenOCD is very limited
+compared to any full scale PC hosted scripting language.
+
+The goal is to keep the internal Jim Tcl interpreter as
+small as possible and allow any advanced scripting,
+especially scripting that interacts with the host,
+run on the host and talk to OpenOCD via the TCP/IP
+scripting connection.
+
+Another problem with Jim Tcl is that there is no debugger
+for it.
+
+With a bit of trickery it should be possible to run Jim
+Tcl scripts under a Tcl interpreter on a PC. The advantage
+would be that the Jim Tcl scripts could be debugged using
+a standard PC Tcl debugger.
+
+The rough idea is to write an unknown proc that sends
+unknown commands to OpenOCD.
+
+Basically a PC version of startup.tcl. Patches most
+gratefully accepted! :-)