The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl>
To: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SDB debugger
Date: Sun, 3 May 2020 23:27:49 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <9ABCFC34-08D2-4C09-8215-F806F9E09835@planet.nl> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2P6L1DPdDW4rhBXD-9v9AhZ2Of339GFLsUVmmiQ+LMu7Q@mail.gmail.com>


> On 3 May 2020, at 18:13, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 4:16 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
> The dbx debugger appears to stand on the shoulders of sdb, and gdb on the shoulders of dbx.
> Mumble ...   It's true rms started with dbx and peed on it in their usually way - similar to the Gosling EMACS to GnuEMACS story.

> But  Mark wrote DBX from scratch, although I would be surprised if looked at how adb and sdb handled the symbol table and could have lifted that code from their.   If I remember discussions with him about it, his interface model was really more VMS debugger more than sdb.   As I said, I really don't remember anyone at UCB in those days using sdb.

I meant that in the sense of Feynmann standing on the shoulders of Einstein, in turn standing on the shoulders of Newton. Not in the sense of swiping stuff.

Things seem to have evolved quite substantially in the 1979-1982 time frame. With 1979 SDB, a.out and its symbols evolve and gain (C based) type information. In 4BSD, late 1980, it evolves some more and gains long symbol names (i.e. >8 chars). SDB tracks this, but stays basically the same.

It would seem that one of the innovations in the first versions of DBX (surviving in 4.1c, end of 1982) was to make use of these long names to store much more detailed type information than the 16-bit field used for this in SDB.

SDB seems to have had a short life: in the V8 source on TUHS is a readme saying that it has been deprecated:

"sdb is deprecated these days.  what's here works, but needs a lot of cleanup.
c works reasonably well.  f77 works barely, especially in areas near
equivalence and common.  (f77 needs cleaning up just as badly.)”

All that seems to match your recollections.


  parent reply	other threads:[~2020-05-03 21:28 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 31+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-05-01 20:48 Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-01 21:57 ` Clem Cole
2020-05-02  9:10   ` Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-02 16:04     ` Clem Cole
2020-05-01 23:05 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2020-05-02  0:49 ` Noel Hunt
2020-05-02  1:22   ` Rob Pike
2020-05-02  3:49     ` Noel Hunt
2020-05-02 20:16   ` Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-03  6:58     ` arnold
2020-05-03 16:13     ` Clem Cole
2020-05-03 16:53       ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 17:06         ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 17:13       ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 20:26         ` Clem Cole
2020-05-05  0:22           ` [TUHS] DEC Compilers (was: " Win Treese
2020-05-05 17:36             ` Paul Winalski
2020-05-05 18:53               ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
2020-05-05 21:59               ` Dan Cross
2020-05-05 21:49             ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 17:35       ` [TUHS] " Paul Winalski
2020-05-03 21:27       ` Paul Ruizendaal [this message]
2020-05-12  4:15 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-05-02  2:52 Doug McIlroy
2020-05-02 17:45 ` Larry McVoy
2020-05-03 16:16   ` Rich Morin
2020-05-12  4:36     ` Dave Horsfall
2020-05-03  2:21 Norman Wilson
2020-05-03  2:41 ` Larry McVoy
2020-05-03  7:14   ` arnold
2020-05-03  3:05 ` Rob Pike

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=9ABCFC34-08D2-4C09-8215-F806F9E09835@planet.nl \
    --to=pnr@planet.nl \
    --cc=tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).