Re: Address spaces

[Stan Shebs <stanshebs@earthlink.net>]

Michael Snyder wrote:
> Anyway, the idea of making CORE_ADDR a struct has been 
> around for a long time.  We've done our best to avoid it, 
> but sort of always known it would come back one day.
>   
Where my prototyping is evolving is to have a new type of object that is 
the struct, tentatively called "target address", consisting of address 
space + CORE_ADDR. From poking through all the references to CORE_ADDR, 
it looks to me like 90%+ have an implicit single address space, so 
structifying seems like an unnecessary nuisance. For instance, when 
you're doing prologue analysis you're only going to be working in the 
one address space (at least for non-Harvard). So I'm thinking higher 
levels will pass around target addresses in a mostly-opaque way, then 
when one gets down to working on a specific program / address space, the 
CORE_ADDRs are extracted and used much as they are now.

While not as abstractly elegant as making all addresses into objects 
right off, it doesn't preclude us from going in that direction; someone 
who wants to make a subsystem use target addresses instead of CORE_ADDRs 
throughout could do so.

Stan