Stab type information in string field

[Ludovic Courtès <ludovic dot courtes at laas dot fr>]

Hi,

The following message was sent to bug-binutils.  I'm forwarding it to
this list since it might be more relevant to post it here.

Ludovic.

----- Forwarded message from Ludovic Courtès <ludovic dot courtes at laas dot fr> -----

Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 17:45:11 +0100
From: Ludovic Courtès <ludovic dot courtes at laas dot fr>
To: bug-binutils at gnu dot org
Subject: Stab type information in string field

Hi,

The "stabs" node in the GNU Info tree says that the type-information is
made of a single number (followed by an "=" sign and so on when defining
a new type).  For instance, the string field corresponding to a local
variable declaration like "int x;" is said to look like "x:1" where 1
corresponds to type "int".

However, when looking at the stabs of a gcc 2.95.4-compiled excutable
(with "objdump -G"), it turns out that type information is formatted
differently.  For instance, the following global variable declaration
"static int i;" results in the following string field :

  450    STSYM  0      28     10012304 40870  i:S(0,1)

Here, the type information is a tuple rather than an integer.  The same
goes for type definitions (the "t" symbol descriptor) and so on.

Could someone please explain me how this works?  Did I miss something?

Thanks,
Ludovic.

----- End forwarded message -----