SPI and I2C, was Re: Raspberry Pi and America,

I don't think of it with respect to C very much, but I suspect you're right. C as it's currently defined does impose some constraints; for example, it pretty much requires a binary machine. Even beyond that, it promises a lot less than most people (seem to) think it does; I've often thought about building a portability-test compiler which goes out of its way to break such assumptions. Something like 9-bit chars, 17-bit shorts, 33-bit ints (with irregular endianness, maybe something like BCAD order, and the padding bits scattered around)...and that's just the beginning. :) I've long had similar feelings about POSIX and OS architecture, the worry that anything that doesn't at least mostly fit the POSIX mold kinda can't be done. I spent six months writing glue code to take a research project in distributed, encrypted storage and present a POSIX interface to it; the project was very interesting, but the need they felt to give it a POSIX interface is, to me, an example of this issue. /~\ 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