stabs is a debugging data format

Debugging data format

A debugging data format is a means of storing information about a compiled computer program for use by high-level debuggers. Modern debugging data formats store enough information to allow source-level debugging....

 for storing information about computer programs for use by symbolic and source-level debugger

Debugger

A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs . The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator , a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered but which...

s. (The information is stored in symbol table entries

Symbol table

In computer science, a symbol table is a data structure used by a language translator such as a compiler or interpreter, where each identifier in a program's source code is associated with information relating to its declaration or appearance in the source, such as its type, scope level and...

; hence the name "stabs".) It "was apparently invented by Peter Kessler at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

"
for use with a Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

 compiler.

History

When stabs was created in the 1980s, the dominant object file

Object file

An object file is a file containing relocatable format machine code that is usually not directly executable. Object files are produced by an assembler, compiler, or other language translator, and used as input to the linker....

 format was a.out, which (unlike more recent formats such as ELF

Executable and Linkable Format

In computing, the Executable and Linkable Format is a common standard file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. First published in the System V Application Binary Interface specification, and later in the Tool Interface Standard, it was quickly accepted among...

) makes no provision for storing debugging information. Stabs works around this problem by encoding the information using special entries in the symbol table

Symbol table

In computer science, a symbol table is a data structure used by a language translator such as a compiler or interpreter, where each identifier in a program's source code is associated with information relating to its declaration or appearance in the source, such as its type, scope level and...

.

At one stage stabs was widely used on Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 systems, but the newer DWARF

DWARF

DWARF is a widely used, standardized debugging data format. DWARF was originally designed along with Executable and Linkable Format , although it is independent of object file formats...

 format has largely supplanted it.

External links

• STABS The GNU Debugger
  GNU Debugger
  The GNU Debugger, usually called just GDB and named gdb as an executable file, is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. It is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Java...
  
  project's description of stabs