Re: [rfa] SYMBOL_NATURAL_NAME, SYMBOL_LINKAGE_NAME

[David Carlton <carlton@math.stanford.edu>]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 22:03:03 -0500, Elena Zannoni <ezannoni@redhat.com> said:
> David Carlton writes:

>> This patch adds macros SYMBOL_NATURAL_NAME and SYMBOL_LINKAGE_NAME to
>> symtab.h.  The former returns what the programmer thinks a symbol is
>> called; the latter returns what the linker thinks a symbol is called.
>> In C, these are the same thing; in C++, the former is the demangled
>> name, and the latter is the mangled name.

> Good move.  A couple of things.  I think the sentence "the
> programmer thinks a symbol is called" is a bit vague.  Maybe
> something like the 'name of a symbol as it appears in the high level
> programming language', or 'name of a symbol as it was declared in
> the high level program' or something like that?

Fair enough.  Maybe "the name of the symbol as referred to in the
source code"?

> Second thing, more important. I think that if we are going to try to
> switch away from using SYMBOL_NAME, we should be renaming it to
> DEPRECATED_SYMBOL_NAME, because this will be more effective than
> putting a 'suggested use' in a comment.  It's a bit more of slog work,
> but we could then even ARI the DEPRECATED_SYMBOL_NAME.

> what do you think?

Absolutely.  That'll help other people conform, and encourage me to
take the time to audit uses of the name sooner rather than later.

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu