Re: Ada Type Information

[dennison@telepath.com]

In article <36E3D3A6.6BAFA0DC@lmco.com>,
  Sam Carnicelli <samuel.charles.carnicelli@lmco.com> wrote:
> dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> >
> > information, that could be a major problem. A new version of the compiler
> > would be well within its rights to add or remove padding, and to completely
> > shuffle the order of the fields.
>
> This is why I want to get the information from a product of the
> compiler.  If a new
> compiler were to change the layout of the record type, I would simply
> have to rerun my tool to get the new information.  All of the methods I
> have mentioned make use of products of the compiler.

Typically the only part of a compilation environemnt that keeps this kind of
information it the debugging support.

We had a situation here where we basicly needed a mini-debugging capability
in our simulator's Instructor Operator Station. So the engineers here
reverse-engineered the debug information created by the compiler. That
solution seemed quite dangerous to me, as a compiler vendor has every reason
to believe they can change the format of that data at will (as long as they
change their debuggers to match). But such a change would require us to redo
the entire reverse-engineering process (or more likely, refuse to ever
upgrade our compiler). In the end, they were convinced to not do this (at
least on this program).

But if you stick to GCC technology, there's probably some standard for the
"-g" output. Perhaps there's even a document somewhere describing it for
prospective debugger writers. This might be a reasonable option, assuming you
are willing to keep up with any changes the gcc folks put in.

T.E.D.

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