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Certain types are built in (int, short, void,
float, etc.); the debugger recognizes these types and knows how
to handle them. Thus, don’t be surprised if some of the following ways
of specifying builtin types do not specify everything that a debugger
would need to know about the type—in some cases they merely specify
enough information to distinguish the type from other types.
The traditional way to define builtin types is convoluted, so new ways
have been invented to describe them. Sun’s acc uses special
builtin type descriptors (‘b’ and ‘R’), and IBM uses negative
type numbers. GDB accepts all three ways, as of version 4.8; dbx just
accepts the traditional builtin types and perhaps one of the other two
formats. The following sections describe each of these formats.