pardo@cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) (04/14/90)
The R2000 hardware disallows references to 4-byte quantities (e.g., ints and floats) that are less than 4-byte aligned. Some DECstation 3100 routines (e.g., /usr/include/varargs.h) assume 8-byte floating-point numbers are 8-byte aligned, tho' I can find no hardware requirement that forces more than 4-byte alignment. Some questions: * Why this convention? * How widespread is it? And a warning: * If you get totally bizarre 8-byte floating-point numbers, check the stack alignment where *printf routines are expected to print floating numbers. Please e-mail answers to the questions; I will post a brief summary. ;-D on ( Brief summary: thin underwear ) Pardo -- pardo@cs.washington.edu {rutgers,cornell,ucsd,ubc-cs,tektronix}!uw-beaver!june!pardo