On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 07:23:04PM -0700, David A. Gatwood wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Cliff Neighbors wrote:
> 
> > being new to PPC I must admit that I was slightly astonished
> > to see that by default the C data type "char" is equivalent to "unsigned
> > char".
> 
> Heh.  Yeah, it's a curious thing.
> 
> 
> > this is not only true for the gcc "specs" in netbsd-macppc, but
> > moreover the "-fsigned-char" flag appears not to be used in the
> > kernel builds.
> 
> Moreover, it's a standard on all PowerPC OSes handed down from on high
> (IBMoto, IIRC).

I believe it's consistent between the two ABIs, but it's important to
understand that the *are* *two* POWER/PowerPC ABIs "handed down from on
high".  So, if you're really interested in what was "handed down from on
high" you have to look at both of them.

Unfortunately, the free OSes all use the SVR4 one, which is obviously broken 
in at least one way (relating to varargs in the kernel).  It's probably
much too late to change that now.

AIX and MacOS (IIRC) use the original AIX ABI, which is *not* the same
as what we use.

Thor