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[The Escapist <579362@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have not yet taken a look at the patch, but I would also recommend to look into using XML or RDF as the underlying markup language (i.e. not just plain text), that would ensure a high degree of consistency for the output, so that it can be clearly specified and standardized.
It would in fact be possible to come up with an XML schema for validating the created output.

Another neat thing is that an XML/RDF based format would be easy to
provide backward compatibility for:

One important thing to do would be providing a "version" attribute for
the created output, so that tools parsing the GNUSim8085 output, can
always refer to this attribute for using the right DTD/schema.

If someone really NEEDS to have a plain text dump for some reason, it
would be trivial to use XSLT to format the XML file differently, in fact
it could even be automatically converted to HTML.

An XML/RDF based output format would be most detailed, so "reducing" it
to less details will always be easier than enriching a  flat plain text
output.

Tools making use of this could in fact trivially run an XPATH expression
against the created output, for example to only get a register dump.

-- 
GNUSim8085 as a regression testing framework?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/579362
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Status in gnusim8085: New

Bug description:
There was some discussion over at the sdcc forums about the lack of a simulator/emulator that could be used for regression testing purposes. Having a simulator/emulator that could be used to do regression tests would be very useful. 
So the question is how complicated it would be to make use of the simulator in GNUSim8085 without necessarily relying on the GUI.
I am envisioning a different startup mode, where the GUI is replaced with a command line/console interface, so that we could run a given source file in a console environment, where the simulator would optionally respond with a dump of the internal state at an arbitrary point, possibly using a markup format such as XML or RDF.

Implementing this would probably be pretty straightforward if the simulator functionality can be easily decoupled from the GUI, i.e. if the simulator is following the MVC pattern.

In addition, this would really not be very complex at all - we would only need to accept a filename and one switch for a mode, i.e. step by step vs. complete runs.

And then, we'd only need to output all internal simulator state (mostly registers, flags, stack) to the console, so that it can be examined by utilities such as "expect".

So, how complicated would it be to have the simulator run in a very limited mode, WITHOUT the GUI?

I envision something along the lines of

./gnusim8085  test.asm

where test.asm would contain:
;---------
mvi a,05h
mvi b,03h
add b
;---------

and running the simulator would simply dump all relevant internal state to the console, preferably in some standardized markup/format.

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2030455&forum_id=1864