Minutes, Dwarf 2 Meeting - January 11, 2000

Issue discussion:

991108.11 Fortran90 arrays
    May not be an issue. Loc Expressions can be used to describe
    dynamic or ragged Fortran arrays. Bevin will describe usage
    of Loc Exprs.

991108.12 Fortran90 allocatable arrays
    Use the Stride attribute of the Subrange type. Bevin will
    describe this usage.

991204.1 Line operator clarification
    Common practice is not clear. Compilers may generate minimum
    instruction length of one, which makes this problem disappear.

    Editorial. Suggested changes to 6.2.4 (4) to indicate that
    some (but not all) statement program opcodes multiply their
    operand by the minimum instruction length. Op descriptions
    should contain explicit references to multiplying operand by
    minimum instruction length.

Documentation:
    Bevin Brett has converted the Dwarf 2 spec from troff to HTML.
    He indicated that this is a "work in progress" and is not complete.
    Mike Eager raised the issue that it is difficult to compare this
    version with the previous version to see what changes were made,
    many of the features of page-oriented documents like page number
    and headings are missing, and that many of the links do not seem
    to work. Bevin suggested that paper was the medium of the past
    and that HTML was the medium of the future. Jim Dehnert said that
    he would produce a PDF version of the HTML document and post it for
    review.

New issues:
    Please do not raise new issues in email which discusses a different
    issue, since it has a high probability of being overlooked.

Assembler syntax:
    Are there any existing implementation of assembler operands which
    support creating Dwarf 2 values (e.g., LEB 128 values) or DIEs?
    Current compilers generate LEB and other values as numeric values
    (using .word or equivalent) instead of depending on the assembler.

Abbreviation table:
    Is it useful to have different abbreviation tables for C and C++?
    Generally no, most compilers provide a single abbrev table for both.
    It is possible to have different abbreviation tables included from
    a library depending on whether C or C++ is being compiled.

Meetings:
    There are a number of issues which do not have proposals and most
    proposals have been discussed and addressed. If there are proposals
    to be discussed, we will meet on Jan 25.