Re: variables in scopes

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

I won't speak to the systemtap syntax.  But as to the general problem, I
think one should distinguish the naming scope being used to specify the
desired symbol, from the PC location being used to identify the frame and
register conditions from which values will be located.  

There are a variety of ways one might want to specify the former:
"parameters of function foobar", "variables visible at given PC/source
location", as well as counted number of lexical blocks in or out from a
given location.  (That is in fact all the information you need to access
statics.)  This pretty much boils down to PC location to indicate scope,
and some of the standard ways you want to convert source specifictions to
PC location.  But you don't want to separate that step fully in all cases.
If specifying scope by source location (perhaps the most common?), that
lookup can yield many PC results for an inline; but the other PC location
being used to identify the frame can help you pick the right one
automatically, just of the PCs for that source location just pick the one
that is inside a block scope that contains the scope of the identified frame.