pointer sizes, was: Re: What does char **ch mean?

P E Smee exspes at gdr.bath.ac.uk
Mon May 20 23:52:41 AEST 1991


In article <5805 at goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok at goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>
>There is no reason why placing NULL at address 0 should throw away
>anything more than one byte of the address space.  

Well, almost.  Though I can see how putting a hole right in the middle
of the address space could be painfully inconvenient.  Also, on
segmented architectures (e.g. Multics) putting NULL at address {0,0}
(more precisely 0|0, and it STILL didn't have a bit pattern which
looked anything like 0) would mean throwing away an entire segment, not
just the one byte.

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee at bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!ukc!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132



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