[Dwarf-discuss] Re: adding new fundamental types to DWARF

[Michael Eager]

Ben Elliston wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> We at IBM are undertaking a project to incorporate the ISO C draft for
> decimal floating point arithmetic into GCC.  This extension to the C99
> standard adds three new fundamental types.  We would like the debugger
> and other utilities to understand these types.
> 
> How can we go about getting fundamental type numbers assigned by the
> DWARF committee?  Would you prefer to see the draft ratified into the
> ISO C standard first?  Can we assign numbers from a non-reserved range
> as a temporary measure?

How to add a new fundamental type?

Write a proposal and submit it as a comment on the dwarf.freestandards.org
website.  Give examples of the new types, their meaning, how they represented
in source, how they are encoded, and how they should be displayed by a debugger.
Propose specific values for the base types.  This is more complete than the
description of existing base types, but, then again, we are pretty
familiar with the existing types like 2's complement binary integer.

Ratified in ISO C?

Not necessarily, but we would like the types to be something that
is almost guaranteed to be in ISO C, not just a proposal.

Assign temp values?

Yup, that's why there are ranges of unassigned or user-reserved values.


-- 
Michael Eager	 eager at eagercon.com
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