What is stabs?

【What is stabs?】

　　The name stabs comes from symbol ta­ble strings, since the debugging data were originally saved as strings in Unix’s a.out object file’s symbol table. Stabs encodes the information about a program in text strings. Initially quite simple, stabs has evolved over time into a quite complex, oc­ casionally cryptic and less­than­consistent debugging format. Stabs is not standard­ ized nor well documented2. Sun Microsys­ tems has made a number of extensions to stabs. GCC has made other extensions