On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 06:56:32PM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> > I was rather fond of the processor series -- byte pointers were NEAT,
> > and if you really want to purge C, the fact that not all pointers are
> > the same length on a PDP-6 or PDP-10 is a big frightening change for
> > C programmers.
> 
> Well, sloppy C programmers.  There are a few of us who know better.

But we still do it!

> I've often considered building a gcc variant that deliberately breaks a
> bunch of the sloppy assumptions people make - like that all pointers
> are the same size, or that *(foo **)&bar_ptr == (foo *)bar_ptr....

I THOUGHT C required that all data pointers be the same size,
but that code pointers could be entirely different beasts?

Mind you some of the M$ code models might have broken this.
(didn't ever use them, only done unix)

The fun starts if the 'null' pointer isn't the all-zero bit
pattern.  Obviously you can't use bzero to clear a structure,
I'm not sure what has to happen to pointers in the bss!
However the following are portable!

	fu *bar = 0;
	if (bar) ...
but:
	int x = 0;
	bar = (fu *)x;
is not!

OTOH this breaks so much code, I don't know if anyone has
seriously implemented it.

	David