Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 09:19:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Gordon Hogenson <ghogenso AT u DOT washington DOT edu>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: object file format change?

> 
> What do people think about changing the object file format from COFF
> to ELF for V2.0?  We would be able to make all the configurations 100%
> compatible with Linux to make things a lot easier, and get better
> debugging and linking support too.
> 

The big advantage of ELF for me is the STABS debugging info. 
Stabs has very impressive C++ expression support.  It's smart about
classes.  You can call member functions and overloaded
functions; it knows about references, scope notation (SCOPE1::SCOPE2),
etc. I believe that inline functions are also handled more intelligently.
At the moment classes are treated as dumb structs, references are
just pointers, and inline functions just confuse GDB.

As an increasing percentage of DJGPP's are now C++ programmers, this
alone is enough (IMHO) to justify the change.

Gordon Hogenson