21 May
2016
21 May
'16
4:24 a.m.
>> -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".
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