Directives for debugging information
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MIPS ECOFF `as' supports several directives used for generating
debugging information which are not support by traditional MIPS
assemblers. These are `.def', `.endef', `.dim', `.file', `.scl',
`.size', `.tag', `.type', `.val', `.stabd', `.stabn', and `.stabs'.
The debugging information generated by the three `.stab' directives can
only be read by GDB, not by traditional MIPS debuggers (this
enhancement is required to fully support C++ debugging). These
directives are primarily used by compilers, not assembly language
programmers!