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Mouse
mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Sat May 21 06:24:37 CDT 2016
>>> -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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