First off, the C standard mandates that the order of
fields in a
struct cannot be reordered,
Yes. (I think this is a Bad Thing, but I can see why
they did it.)
Given that C is a systems implementation language, how would you
define HW related data structures where the order of the fields is
critical (ie HW defines them).
I can see three answers.
1) Don't use structs for that. Look at NetBSD's bus-space abstraction
for one possible way.
2) Make any reordering implementation-defined, so that code for
specific implementations can know how the implementation does it.
3) Make reordering optional. Which way the default should go is
arguable; since my guess is that most structs are not
hardware-interface structs, the default should be reordering, with
some keyword specifying no reordering.
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