[Dwarf-Discuss] decoding of form entries

[David Anderson]

On 08/02/2010 12:58 AM, Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> Something that has been bugging me for a while is that I am not sure I
> understand the meaning of 2.19  p 40 (dw4) that talks about how to
> retrieve the value associated to an attribute in an entry. It says:
>
> "For a reference, the value is a reference to another entity whose
> value is the value of the
> attribute."

The quoted sentence from DWARF4 confuses me too.

A 'reference' is defined in 'classes of attribute value', Figure 3, as 
referring to
a debugging information entry or a type signature.

The word 'entity' is used to refer to data in the running application, as in 

Sec 2.1:
" An entry, or group of entries together, provide a description of a
corresponding entity in the source program. "
Or elsewhere "entity in memory"  or "Program entity".

Others seem to think the 'entity' is another DIE (indeed
I think that was the intent), but I wonder what
in DWARF4 terminology supports that interpretation of that word 'entity' 
in 2.19.

The sentence seems(?) to be inconsistent with the rest of DWARF4 in its
use of 'entity'.

David Anderson

-- 
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.  -- Aldous Huxley