21 May
2016
21 May
'16
4:56 p.m.
On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 9:59 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
[...]
On May 21,
2016, at 4:33 AM, Mouse <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG> wrote:
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). 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.) My biggest complaint about the C standard is that the
order that bits
within a bit field are compiler defined. This basically means that they
are completely unusable for anything that requires interoperability.
Agreed. It was a solved problem in Ada back in 1983, so I don't know
why the C committees couldn't have solved it in ANSI C in 1989, or
ISO C in 1990, 1995, 1999, or 2011. Maybe the C committee is no
longer concerned with use of C for low-level systems programming?
(Though IMNSHO that's the only thing that it's even vaguely reasonable
for.)
Admittedly representation specifications are an *optional* part of
Ada, but any Ada compiler intended for systems programming use would
support them.