[cxx-abi-dev] __cxa_demangle of type manglings

[Jason Merrill]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:20:38 -0800 (PST), Dennis Handly <dhandly at cup.hp.com> wrote:
>>From: Jason Merrill <jason at redhat.com>

>>The ABI specification says that the argument to __cxa_demangle can be
>>'either an external name, i.e.  with a "_Z" prefix, or an internal NTBS
>>mangling, e.g.  of a type for type_info', and later that
>
> We had a customer that insisted that __cxa_demangle work for type_info
> so their code would be portable.

So your __cxa_demangle always interprets an argument as a type mangling if
possible?  That's the behavior I'm advocating.

>>and that we should add another way to specify that the argument is an
>>external name, probably via another entry point.
>
> There is no need to have another entry.  If it doesn't start with "_Z"
> it is a type or a non-mangled object or function name.

Yes, but which?  Type or non-mangled name?  That's the ambiguity, and I
think the user should be able to control how it is resolved.

> One other special thing I did for c++filt, where I added advanced AI
> technology, if you have a file, it only demangles tokens if it starts with
> "_Z".  If you provide the string on the command line, it assumes you want
> to demangle a type_info.
>
> (This seems to be what gnu c++filt (3.2) does.)

Yep.

Jason