?wordread/?wordwrite was written with maximal human readability in mind. Somebody who has a misbehaving roach deployed somewhere can just telnet/netcat/socat/etc to port 7147 and issue a wordread to see if enough bits are toggling, or if some counter is ticking over, set a debug flag, etc.
I would've just used `wordread/write` but as of the latest version of the Raspberry Pi image, that functionality is broken. I tried updating to the latest version of katcp_devel (75dde9d), but then nothing worked at all.
?read/?write are intended to retrieve larger chunks of data, and use a represenation which is reasonably efficient. The link to the powerpc isn't particularly fast, and while there are things that could be optimised further, the current backslash encoding isn't computationally expensive and adds a bit over 3% overhead, which I think is reasonably good.
Why does it need to be efficient? Especially considering in other parts of the codebase we're bit-banging SPI through katcp messages (which is a single bit for a 28 byte message, a cool 0.45% efficiency)
When I was referring to escape (and cornered programmers) in the previous mail I didn't only mean literal escape characters, but also a means to escape some of the constaints or access extended functionality. In the above case, binary(ish) data to do more efficient bulk transfers.
But again, was there an actual problem this was solving? Was there a throughput issue somewhere that required spec-breaking changes? For bulk transfer (like uploading the FPG file), this was solved with opening a separate TCP connection and streaming bytes that way.
Of course, there is also nothing stopping you from only using ?wordread and ?wordwrite in your rust library if the ?read and ?write requests strike you as suffiently awkward.
Besides the commands being broken, it's not just awkward to use `read` and `write`, it's not valid katcp. It will not parse with the formal grammar given. Having messages that break the contract defeats the whole purpose of having a formal specification.
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