Re: [RFA] delete BLOCK_SHOULD_SORT

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 03:15:40PM -0700, David Carlton wrote:
> I'd like to delete all occurences of BLOCK_SHOULD_SORT from GDB; it's
> really no longer necessary, and will get in the way of my dictionary
> work.
> 
> The history, as I understand it, is that formerly symbols in blocks
> were always stored linearly; but, for blocks where the order didn't
> matter, the symbols were sorted to improve search time.  Then blocks
> using hashtables were introduced; these are now used almost everywhere
> that sorted linear blocks had been previously used.  In particular,
> blocks produced by buildsym.c, which is the vast majority of blocks,
> will never satisfy BLOCK_SHOULD_SORT.

...

> So, basically, making this change will get rid of some cruft, make an
> unnoticeable speed improvement to symbol manipulation stuff for normal
> usage, and when debugging ECOFF files, symbol table lookup will be a
> bit slower.  (But it will still be correct: this is removing an
> optimization, but the unoptimized behavior will still work.)  If
> anybody out there actually uses ECOFF and is bothered by this, clearly
> the best thing would be for that person to convert mdebugread.c to use
> the mechanisms in buildsym.c just like every other debugging format
> reader.
> 
> I think the changes are pretty straightforward, though I'd appreciate
> it if somebody more conversant with ada-lang.c than I am could make
> sure I'm not missing anything with my change there.

For what it's worth, it all looks good (and worth doing!) to me.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer