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<h1 class="settitle">STABS</h1>
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<h2 class="chapter">1 Overview of Stabs</h2>

<p><dfn>Stabs</dfn> refers to a format for information that describes a program
to a debugger.  This format was apparently invented by
Peter Kessler at
the University of California at Berkeley, for the <code>pdx</code> Pascal
debugger; the format has spread widely since then.

   <p>This document is one of the few published sources of documentation on
stabs.  It is believed to be comprehensive for stabs used by C.  The
lists of symbol descriptors (see <a href="Symbol-Descriptors.html#Symbol-Descriptors">Symbol Descriptors</a>) and type
descriptors (see <a href="Type-Descriptors.html#Type-Descriptors">Type Descriptors</a>) are believed to be completely
comprehensive.  Stabs for COBOL-specific features and for variant
records (used by Pascal and Modula-2) are poorly documented here.

<!-- FIXME: Need to document all OS9000 stuff in GDB; see all references -->
<!-- to os9k_stabs in stabsread.c. -->
   <p>Other sources of information on stabs are <cite>Dbx and Dbxtool
Interfaces</cite>, 2nd edition, by Sun, 1988, and <cite>AIX Version 3.2 Files
Reference</cite>, Fourth Edition, September 1992, "dbx Stabstring Grammar" in
the a.out section, page 2-31.  This document is believed to incorporate
the information from those two sources except where it explicitly directs
you to them for more information.

<ul class="menu">
<li><a accesskey="1" href="Flow.html#Flow">Flow</a>: 			Overview of debugging information flow
<li><a accesskey="2" href="Stabs-Format.html#Stabs-Format">Stabs Format</a>: 		Overview of stab format
<li><a accesskey="3" href="String-Field.html#String-Field">String Field</a>: 		The string field
<li><a accesskey="4" href="C-Example.html#C-Example">C Example</a>: 			A simple example in C source
<li><a accesskey="5" href="Assembly-Code.html#Assembly-Code">Assembly Code</a>: 		The simple example at the assembly level
</ul>

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