28 Jun
2020
28 Jun
'20
4:20 p.m.
On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 01:32:02PM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
[...]
Why is byte-granularity in addressing a necessity?
Because C's strings are broken by design and require one to be able to form a
pointer to individual characters.
It's only an issue if you have instructions that
operate directly on byte
quantities in memory.
One wheeze is to just declare that bytes are the same size as a machine word. C
doesn't require char to be exactly 8 bits, but merely at least 8 bits. However,
a lot of C code will break if char, short, int and long aren't exactly the same
size as they are on x86. Mind you, a lot of it is still broken even if they
are...