NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/std/c/3436

Text File | 1993-01-28 | 1.9 KB | 40 lines

Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!paperboy.osf.org!meissner
From: [e-mail] (Michael Meissner)
Subject: Re: Structure walking
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Wed, 27 Jan 1993 01:46:43 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: Open Software Foundation
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
    <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Jan 93 12:08:02
Lines: 26

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Norman Diamond) writes:

| In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Larry Jones) writes:
| >In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Mike Schilling) writes:
| >> (e) The alignment required by the structure is equal to the most restrictive
| >>     alignment of any of its members.
|
| >True, but see (a).
|
| Well Mr. Jones, you and I seem to be the only people who feel this way.
| Most of the regulars in this group felt that even a structure like this:
|    struct mychar { char x; }
| might be given an alignment requirement of 32 by some compiler, even if
| char only requires an alignment of 1 under the same compiler.  Of course,
| I only saw this on Usenet; you've seen the committee's deliberations.

True, and I even made a compiler that did this.  The compiler was on a
word machine (the Data General MV/Eclipse).  All structures had to
have word alignment, even if the members were only character.  This
was necessary because of the requirement that all structure pointers
look the same, to allow pointers to unknown structures to be declared.
--
Michael Meissner    email: [e-mail]        phone: [phone]
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

You are in a twisty little passage of standards, all conflicting.