gas: unhelpful sprint_value() behavior

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jan,

> Since addressT, valueT, and bfd_vma are all the same (nowadays?) anyway
> and since there are pretty few uses of the function, would there be any
> objection to dropping it, making the callers use sprint_vma() instead?

In the past I had thought that changes like this were obvious improvements.
Then I started seeing bug reports from users complaining about the change in
behaviour of a tool that they had been using for years, so now I am bit more
wary.

My suggestion would be that rather than making a blanket change you either
provide a new command line option to determine the desired behaviour and/or
a configure time option to select the default behaviour.

On a related note, there is an open PR about similar behaviour in readelf:

   https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=27672

This is probably going to be resolved by a new command line option for readelf,
so it might be nice if a similar naming scheme is used in gas, assuming that
you agree with the new-option idea.

Cheers
   Nick