gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (08/20/87)
In article <2163@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: >I don't think it is a useful endeavor to labor at such length to embed >the hardware design mistakes of the past in the C standards of the >future. Please explain how we're doing this. I don't recall anything in the draft proposed American National Standard for C that is present solely because of segmented architectures. Certainly not the requirement that no data object be given an address indistinguishable from a null pointer; that constraint is logically necessary and has been with us for a long time. Undoubtedly there are some 80*86 compilers that purport to be C compilers but do not correctly implement anything that could reasonably be called "C". I suggest not buying them (even better, let the vendors know why you don't buy such products).
drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley) (08/21/87)
gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes: > In article <2163@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > >I don't think it is a useful endeavor to labor at such length to embed > >the hardware design mistakes of the past in the C standards of the > >future. > Please explain how we're doing this. I suspect that kent wants: All addresses are pointers into an enormous, linear address space. Thus, any two pointers can be subtracted, one can point off the beginning or end of a malloc'ed section of memory, etc. All addresses are byte-addressed, and are the same size and alignment as ints. One can dereference NULL. etc. These are the same complaints that are voiced here all the time, usually in the form: "Lots of [bad] code depends on this, so it should work." It is best summarized by the phrase "idiots who think all the world's a Vax". C is (or should be) a high-level language. Hardware architecture shouldn't leak into the code one writes, at least when the code conforms to an ANSI standard. Dale -- Dale Worley Cullinet Software ARPA: cullvax!drw@eddie.mit.edu UUCP: ...!seismo!harvard!mit-eddie!cullvax!drw OS/2: Yesterday's software tomorrow Nuclear war? There goes my career!