stabs

stabs (sometimes written STABS) is a debugging data format for storing information about computer programs for use by symbolic and source-level debuggers. (The information is stored in symbol table strings; hence the name "stabs".) Cygnus Support attributes the invention of stabs to Peter Kessler for the Berkeley Pascal pdx debugger, however, he claims otherwise, stating stabs came with adb and sdb but could predate those. Mark Linton, who created pdx for his 1981 master's thesis and later developed it into dbx, states his doctoral adviser Michael L. Powell "contributed to the stabstrings design, especially to support Modula-2".