From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 5603 invoked by alias); 23 Oct 2002 23:59:13 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 5595 invoked from network); 23 Oct 2002 23:59:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.redhat.com) (216.138.202.10) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 23 Oct 2002 23:59:09 -0000 Received: from redhat.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost.redhat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0DB543D4A; Wed, 23 Oct 2002 19:59:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3DB737CA.3080308@redhat.com> Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 16:59:00 -0000 From: Andrew Cagney User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD macppc; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020824 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Carlton Cc: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [patch] some mindless additions of BLOCK_ macros References: <3DB72AE4.1040908@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-10/txt/msg00499.txt.bz2 > On Wed, 23 Oct 2002 19:04:04 -0400, Andrew Cagney said: > > >>> I recently noticed that the BLOCK_ macros weren't used everywhere >>> they could be. I know Andrew doesn't like macros, but given that >>> these ones are used almost everywhere, they might as well be used >>> everywhere. > > >> Yep. > > >> It's more that I like opaque types - it is all about `control' - >> with an opaque type it simply isn't possible to sneak in [old] code >> that grubs around in the internals. You could consider block.[hc]? > > > Opaque types are good, no question about that. Some of the macros in > symtab.h are also places where polymorphism would be helpful (c.f. the > recent INIT_DEMANGLED_NAME stuff), but I don't think people would be > too open to starting to rewrite parts of GDB in C++ just yet... It's also possible using C (just a bit garish). Anyway, ``C++ has all the disadvantages of C, but none of the advantages of object oriented programming'' [gordoni]. I'd really rather wait for Java - universities are churning out Java programmers by the zillions. > Actually, the reason why I discovered some of these places was because > I did create block.h on carlton_dictionary-branch: I got sick of > having to recompile most of GDB every time I tried to fiddle with > struct block, so I split out struct block and struct blockvector. > (But I haven't created block.c, largely because there's only two > function prototypes that seem to clearly belong in block.h.) I posted > an RFC for splitting up symtab.h a few weeks ago, which got a tepid > response; if I decide that I like having a separate block.h, I'll > probably test the waters again in a month or so and see if I can get > approval for it on the mainline as well. (And maybe eventually split > out other parts of symtab.h later; who knows.) Perhaphs a different marketing approach is needed. Instead of trying to sell the ``splitting of symtab.h into 50 million little files'' (which will have everyone running in fear :-), propose the creation of a single large block.[hc] that contains an opaque block/vector object (which will have everyone thinking - hmm, sounds good, can't hurt anyone, certainly do-able, even incremental so no need to branch, ... :-). Andrew