Symbol table

Because of symbolic debugging requirements, the order of symbols in the symbol table is very important. Symbols appear in the sequence shown in Table 7-11, ``COFF symbol table''.

Table 7-11 COFF symbol table

 ------------------------------
|          filename 1         |
|-----------------------------|
|          function 1         |
|-----------------------------|
|      C_WEAKEXT aliases      |
|        for function 1       |
|-----------------------------|
|     function 1b (alias)     |
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
| local symbols for function 1|
|-----------------------------|
|          function 2         |
|-----------------------------|
|      C_WEAKEXT aliases      |
|        for function 2       |
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
| local symbols for function 2|
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
|           statics           |
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
|          filename 2         |
|-----------------------------|
|          function 1         |
|-----------------------------|
|      C_WEAKEXT aliases      |
|        for function 1       |
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
| local symbols for function 1|
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
|           statics           |
|-----------------------------|
|           . . .             |
|-----------------------------|
|    defined global symbols   |
|-----------------------------|
|   undefined global symbols  |
|-----------------------------|

The word ``statics'' in Table 7-11, ``COFF symbol table'' means symbols defined with the C language storage class static outside any function. The symbol table consists of at least one fixed-length entry per symbol with some symbols followed by auxiliary entries of the same size. The entry for each symbol is a structure that holds the value, the type, and other information.