Re: A curiosity...

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Yes. In fact, C requires that pointers and integers be interchangable
> so as to make address arithmetic "transparent" and extremely
> dangerous. That's why, instead of writing "&th[t]" as Adam did, they
> wrote "th+t" and thought themselves clever.

And I think this rule is responsible for the "limitation" that all
current processor architectures use addresses which are the same size
as integers. Before the advent of C, address size and word size were
not necessarily the same; now they always are, and that's *only* for
compatibility with C.

Nowadays, computers are moving towards non-uniform memory
architectures (e.g. main memory, video memory, network interface cache
memory, physics processor memory, etc.) which would map extremely well
to Ada's storage pools and very poorly with C's pointer arithmetic.

--
Ludovic Brenta.