Re: Patch for pascal-dynamic arrays

[Jan Kratochvil <jan.kratochvil@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:07:11 +0200, Joost van der Sluis wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-10-04 at 16:17 +0200, Jan Kratochvil wrote:
...
> > * Are the new Pascal testcase FAILures expected?  If a more recent fpc is
> >   required the testcase should XFAIL, not FAIL.
> 
> Yes, they need a new fpc-version (2.3.1 or higher).

So the testcase should check the version (or if the seen behavior is clear it
is the old version) and setup_xfail appropriately.


> In principle, that information should be
> removed from 'struct main_type', since the lower_bound, upper_bound and
> length aren't defined for plain structures, without any address set.

This is again about the question whether dynamic types should be:

* fully dynamic, evaluating the bound value on each access by GDB code
  (it was this way in the very first VLA patch version)
  I was suggesting this solution in:
    http://sourceware.org/ml/archer/2009-q2/msg00181.html

* static using check_typedef() as the current GDB codebase where a dynamic
  type gets instantiated into its static type variant before it gets used
  (this is the current VLA patch version)
  One needs object_address for the instantiation but not later.

Your patch goes +/- the latter way by the instaniation (via field
`checked_dynamics') but still it would require to change all the functions
handling `struct type *' for possible arrays as even after the instantiation
`struct type *' is not enough there'.

Anyway if it gets regression-free I am fine with including it into
archer-jankratochvil-vla in its current form (after reviewing of the
regression-free form).  But still for FSF GDB HEAD I would like to see
introducing something like `struct dynamic_type *' evaluated dynamically and
requiring object_address for it while being passed as normal `struct type *'
to the legacy parts of GDB.  One should not be able to interchange
pre-check_typedef() and post-check_typedef() types in the code as they are two
different kinds.  But that is not done now.


Thanks,
Jan