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Fortran (at least, the Sun and SGI dialects of FORTRAN-77) has a feature
which allows allocating arrays with malloc, but which avoids
blurring the line between arrays and pointers the way that C does. In
stabs such a variable uses the ‘b’ symbol descriptor.
For example, the Fortran declarations
real foo, foo10(10), foo10_5(10,5) pointer (foop, foo) pointer (foo10p, foo10) pointer (foo105p, foo10_5)
produce the stabs
foo:b6 foo10:bar3;1;10;6 foo10_5:bar3;1;5;ar3;1;10;6
In this example, real is type 6 and type 3 is an integral type
which is the type of the subscripts of the array (probably
integer).
The ‘b’ symbol descriptor is like ‘V’ in that it denotes a
statically allocated symbol whose scope is local to a function; see
See Static Variables. The value of the symbol, instead of being the address
of the variable itself, is the address of a pointer to that variable.
So in the above example, the value of the foo stab is the address
of a pointer to a real, the value of the foo10 stab is the
address of a pointer to a 10-element array of reals, and the value of
the foo10_5 stab is the address of a pointer to a 5-element array
of 10-element arrays of reals.