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macro usage in bfd

Ian Lance Taylor ian@wasabisystems.com
Wed May 26 03:36:00 GMT 2004 
Alan Modra <amodra@bigpond.net.au> writes:

> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 10:15:52PM -0400, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > "H. J. Lu" <hjl@lucon.org> writes:
> > > How about changing sec->name to bfd_get_section_name (bfd, sec)?
> > I think that would be a good idea.

> con (specific):
> o  More typing.
> o  Not more readable.  Longer lines, resulting in more line wraps.
> o  No extra info conveyed by using the macro.  In some cases similar
>    bfd macros convey *less* info, eg. bfd_get_section_alignment, which
>    I recently replaced with sec->alignment_power in merge.c.  The latter
>    hints that it is a power of 2 value, not a byte alignment.
> o  The bfd param is unused, and in some places unavailable.  People
>    write sec->owner just to satisfy the macro, but sec->owner is NULL in
>    some cases.  Such code possibly won't work if we ever need to use
>    the bfd in the macro.

I agree here.  It should probably just take a section argument.

> o  Abstraction isn't alway appropriate in library code (as distinct from
>    user code).  eg. bfd_set_section_vma sets lma too, behind your back.
>    Another example is the mess we have with bfd_section_size,
>    bfd_get_section_size_before_reloc, bfd_get_section_size_after_reloc.

Reasonable--user code should use bfd_get_section_name, but for BFD
code it doesn't matter much.

Ian
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