Re: how to support C type qualifiers applied to arrays?

[Jim Blandy <jimb at codesourcery dot com>]

"Gary Funck" <gary@intrepid.com> writes:
>> From: Jim Blandy
>> Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 2:37 PM
>> 
>> "Gary Funck" <gary@intrepid.com> writes:
>> > Here, GCC sets TREE_THIS_VOLATILE in the DECL node of S,
>> > but does not attempt to clone the type description of
>> > s_struct, and to populate the volatile qualifier across all
>> > contained member types.  This works for GCC because it
>> > propagates the qualifiers as it evaluates expressions.
>> > Thus when evaluating S.c[10], GCC starts with the knowledge
>> > that S is volatile, thus S.c is volatile, and S.c[1] is
>> > volatile.
>> 
>> Okay --- this is a different problem altogether.  This one is indeed
>> GDB's fault: referring to a field of a volatile- or const-qualified
>> structure should get you a member with the same qualifiers.
>> [...]
>> > Typedefs above are used to illustrate that "volatile" must
>> > be factored to the lowest level types of the components,
>> > and must also appear at the struct level to accommodate
>> > operations on the entire structure.
>> 
>> Just to be clear: GCC should *not* perform the transformation you're
>> suggesting here and record the result in the DWARF info.  GDB should
>> propagate the qualifiers itself.
>
> This leads to the next question: how difficult will it be to
> teach GDB to properly track type qualifiers when evaluating
> expressions?  Which files/functions will likely need to be
> changed?  Are there mechanisms within GDB already that track
> various value attributes along with the expression values
> themselves?

I think that should be a pretty straightforward change to
value_primitive_field, value_subscripted_rvalue, and probably
value_coerce_array.