16 Oct
2011
16 Oct
'11
12:58 p.m.
On 16/10/11 3:00 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Wouldn't a real macro system be handy!
--Toby
Not the same at all. I don't believe that in
C I can declare:
bit anything[60000];
Standard C provides one predefined data type that is semantically a bit,
which is _Bool. ...
It would have been nice if C had offered a packed array type, such that
in a packed array of _Bool each component would occupy only one bit of
storage. The difficulty that arises from that is that you can't have a C
pointer to one of those bits (unless a new kind of C pointer is
invented), and that it breaks the semantics of the indexing (square
bracket) and dereferencing (unary *) operators. That's not to say that
it couldn't be done, just that it definitely will complicate the
language definition significantly. One could argue either way about
whether that complication is justifiable.