Re: Leading character for BINARY format ?

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at zembu dot com>]

   Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 11:36:40 -0700
   From: Nick Clifton <nickc@cygnus.com>

   It means that since the binary format does not have any symbols of its
   own, the BFD code has to generate some symbols for it, and it chooses
   to generate these symbols with a leading underscore.

Yes.

   : I don't understand why anything has to change in BFD.

   The problem is that BFD generates these symbols with a leading
   underscore, but in the BFD target vector it sets the
   'symbol_leading_char' field to 0.  This seems to me to be incorrect.
   I think that it should be set to '_'.

No.  If we set symbol_leading_char to '_', then logically the symbols
are named without a leading underscore.  symbol_leading_char is a
symbol which is added to the start of the symbol as seen from C.  So
if symbol_leading_char is '_', then the symbols as seen from C
logically have no underscore.  But I think the symbols logically
should have a leading underscore, since they are system generated and
therefore should not conflict with user symbols.

   No.  The problem is that is not (currently) possible to strip the
   leading underscores from the symbols generated by BFD for a binary
   format input using the --remove-leading-char switch to objcopy.

This is true, but I don't yet see why it is a problem.  If you compile
this file using ELF:
    int _i;
you can't use --remove-leading-char to remove that underscore either.

I don't think anything would break if we changed symbol_leading_char
for the binary object file format.  But I don't see why it is right to
do so.

I do think objcopy should have an option to rename symbols using a sed
style regexp.  But I've never gotten around to implementing that.

Ian