[Dwarf-Discuss] name lookup w/ using directives

[John DelSignore]

I don't know what the right answer is here, but I can tell you what we do in TotalView.

The DWARF information, is translated to our internal symbol table format during what we call "incorporation" time. The symbol table incorporators build data structures that are pretty much language neutral, but the incorporators do in many cases do have to know about language, the compiler vendor, and sometimes even compiler version. In a prefect world, we wouldn't need to know so much about what individual compilers and compiler versions do, but since we live on Earth, we do.

Anyway, as I said, the symbol table incorporators build data symbol table structures that are pretty much language neutral, but each file scope knows its language (C, C++, Fortran 77, Fortran 9x, Assembler, etc.), and most symbols are descendants of file scopes. When symbol table lookups happen, they use the language rules of the language for the enclosing lookup scope. In fact, the debugger core client code calls a method named "find_by_language_rules", which delegates to language-specific lookup functions like "find_by_cplus_language_rules", "find_by_f9x_language_rules", etc.

So, I think that it's not true that we need a different tag for the C++ using directive. The fact that the DWARF tag is doing double duty for C++/Fortran doesn't really matter to TotalView, and TotalView gets it all correct today. What really matters to us is getting accurate compilation unit language and compiler vendor/version information. If we have that, we can work out the semantics of what a particular tag, such as DW_TAG_imported_module, means.

Cheers, John D.


Kendrick Wong wrote:
> 
> Jason wrote:
>> The DWARF has the same nesting information as the source code; the
>> consumer can use the same algorithm as the compiler.  I don't think we
>> want to encode standard lookup rules in the debugging information;
>> better to put that in one place in the debugger rather expand the
>> debugging information for every occurrence of a using-declaration.
> 
> I still have some reservation about building dependencies on the C++
> language rules into DWARF.  All of the other TAGs that I am aware of,
> are language independent, so a DWARF consumer don't have to worry about
> the language and still be able to interpret the DWARF data correctly.
> 
> The DW_TAG_imported_module seems to break this rule.  For Fortran, the
> namespace is imported immediately.  For C++, the namespace is imported
> at a later time, not to mention all the other intricacies regarding
> common enclosing scope.  From this point of view, I really think C++
> using directive needs a different tag.
> 
> Thanks,
> Regards,
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Kendrick Wong
> z/OS C/C++ Compiler
> Common Debug Architecture
> C2/YGK/8200/MKM *
> kendrick at ca.ibm.com*
> Office:*905-413-2865* Fax:*905-413-4839* Tie:*313-2865*
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Dwarf-Discuss mailing list
> Dwarf-Discuss at lists.dwarfstd.org
> http://lists.dwarfstd.org/listinfo.cgi/dwarf-discuss-dwarfstd.org