ndiamond@watdaisy.UUCP (Norman Diamond) (02/07/85)
Two independent ideas here: (1) There still exists a wide variety of machines, including new ones invented almost daily, where registers are not large enough to hold pointers and address arithmetic is non-trivial and you would not want to make sizeof (anytype *) == sizeof (int). You still COULD increase the size of an int so that sizeof (sometypes *) == sizeof (int), but you would regret the waste of space and/or subroutine calls to do all of your int arithmetic. (2) If you want to define some null pointer that's pretty well guaranteed to work, and pass it as a parameter to a subroutine, you can make your null pointer (char *) 0, and make all of your pointer parameters char *'s. Why? Because: calloc returns a char *, and you can always cast the result to convert to any kind of <type> * that you might need. Therefore we know sizeof (char *) >= sizeof (anytype *), for any anytype. Of course, your procedure calls will have to cast all pointer parameters to char *'s, and your procedure code will have to cast them back. -- Norman Diamond UUCP: {decvax|utzoo|ihnp4|allegra|clyde}!watmath!watdaisy!ndiamond CSNET: ndiamond%watdaisy@waterloo.csnet ARPA: ndiamond%watdaisy%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa "Opinions are those of the keyboard, and do not reflect on me or higher-ups."