64 bit architectures and C/C++

[Blair P. Houghton]

In article <314 at orac.UUCP> bret at orac.UUCP (Bret Indrelee) writes:
>In article <16103 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>It "should" not matter to any sensible application.
>
>Except maybe the guy writing a device driver, where the person needs
>to exactly match the size of a data type to the size of a hardware
>register.  Yet another reason to spread the sizes around.

Picayune semantics: "sensible applications" and "device
drivers" are two entirely different laws of physics.

More to the point:  the driver developer is going to be
doing many things more heinous than bit-fields; e.g., casting
integer types to pointer types in order to reach memory
mappings (even tricks with indexing "all of memory" require
placing the base of the "all-of-memory array" at some
defined point).

ANSI C is specifically not designed for that sort of work.

Such things are often better done in assembler, anyway
(regardless of ease-of-maintenance).

				--Blair
				  "The janitorial service industry
				   is 7000 years old, and still
				   nobody thinks there's any dirty
				   work left to be done..."