nld and noft Manual

nld Diagnostic Messages
nld and noft Manual—520384-003
10-3
Terms That Appear in nld Diagnostic Messages
COFF (common object file format). This is the name for an older object file format that the
typical user should no longer be using. The newer object file format is called ELF
(executable and linkable format).
cold load subvolume. In Guardian, this is a location where the standard SRLs are kept.
data. Whenever nld refers to “data,” it is always referring to data that exists outside of any
procedure, as opposed to data that resides on the stack and comes and goes when
procedures are called and return. It is nld’s responsibility to lay out the data that exists
outside of procedures. nld has nothing to do with data on the stack.
data section. The data section is one of the five possible data sections. It contains large,
initialized data.
data sections. An object file can contain the following five types of data sections:
The various data sections are grouped in segments of the object file.
The compiler specifies into which section a data item is to be placed. nld assigns
addresses to the data in each section, but usually does not change the section to
which a data item belongs. The exception, when nld moves data from “bss” to “data,”
can occur when building an SRL or user library.
declare/declaration. A symbol is said to be declared in an object file when it is a name that
is listed in that object file as something visible to the linker. A symbol that is declared
might also be defined, which means that the symbol physically exists in this object file.
If a declaration is not also a definition, it is only an external reference to a symbol of
that name that should be defined somewhere else.
When a symbol is visible across separate compilations, the separate compilations are
logically referring to the same symbol. Alternatively, a symbol might be visible only
within a single compilation, in which case symbols of the same name in different
compilations are in fact different symbols at run time.
The syntax for declaring a symbol, telling if it should be visible across separate
compilations, and telling whether it is also defined, depends on the language used, and
it is beyond the scope of this manual to explain the syntax of specific languages.
Data Section Type Description
data section large, initialized data
sdata section small, initialized data
bss section large, uninitialized data
sbss section small, uninitialized data
rdata section read-only data