strangest systems I've sent email from

[Mouse]

>>>   -spc (Wish the C standard committee had the balls to say "2's
>>>   complement all the way, and a physical bit pattern of all 0s is a
>>>   NULL pointer" ... )
>> As far as I'm concerned, this is different only in degree from `Wish
>> the C standard committee had the balls to say "Everything is x86".'.

> First off, can you supply a list of architectures that are NOT 2's
> complement integer math that are still made and in active use today?

> Second, are there any architectures still commercially available and
> used today where an all-zero bit pattern for an address *cannot* be
> used as NULL?

What's the relevance?  You think the C spec should tie itself to the
idiosyncracies of today's popular architectures?

> [3]	I only bring this up because you seem to be assuming my
>       position is "all the world's on x86"

No, I don't think that's your position.  I'm using that as a satirical
exaggeration of your position.  If I'd been writing this twenty years
ago, I would have written "VAX" instead, because that was the machine
widely assumed at the time.

>       And because of this, I checked some of your C code and I
>       noticed you used 0 and 1 as exit codes, which, pedantically
>       speaking, isn't portable.

%SYSTEM-W-NORMAL, normal successful completion.

My code makes no pretense to portability to all dialects of C.  (Well,
most of it; there might be a little that is supposed to be that
portable, but I can't think of anything offhand.)

Besides exit codes, I assume ints are relatively large (a significant
fraction of my code will explode badly on <32-bit ints) and that the
underlying system is basically Unix.  Some of it should work on
anything POSIX.  Relatively little of it will work on non-POSIX C
implementations.  Some of it even calls for NetBSD with my patches
applied (eg, anything depending on AF_TIMER sockets).

> 	Yes, I'll admit this might be a low blow here ...

Perhaps.  But I don't see it as relevant.  It's a long way from "much
of my code is restricted to $CLASS_OF_ENVIRONMENTS" to "I think the C
standard should write off anything outside $CLASS_OF_ENVIRONMENTS".

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B