Re: [RFC] Decimal Floating Point support for GDB (Part 1: patch)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 10:14:15 +0800 (CST)
> From: Wu Zhou <woodzltc@cn.ibm.com>
> cc: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com
> 
> 1. If this patch is accepted, do we also need any document?  IMO, maybe 
> gdb user manual needed to be updated to reflect this feature.

I'm not sure; the similar "1234.565f" feature is not documented
anywhere.  I guess the idea is that a programmer in the C language
should know about this C feature, and GDB just supports the C language
by accepting its syntax for numbers.  Isn't the same true for your
additions, i.e., isn't "1234.56df" going to be a valid C number
syntax?

> What about gdb internal?  Do we need to update that too?

gdbint.texinfo should have a description of language-specific files,
what they do and how to build one for a new language.  One minor issue
that should be part of that description is the number syntax.  I'd be
thrilled to see such a description added to gdbint, but since there's
no such description now, I don't feel I can ask you to write a tiny
addition to a non-existent chapter.  But if you can find time to write
a full description of the C expression syntax support, I'd gratefully
review it.

> 2. As you might know, dfp for gcc is also under development. And my patch 
> depends on the availablity of that?  How did gdb handle this kind of 
> situation before?  Did we need to wait until dfp is ready for gcc?

There's no need to wait, IMHO, since this feature in GDB will not
cause any harm unless and until GDB sees some program whose DWARF info
includes these special tags.