Re: A curiosity...

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> 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.

No such limitation exists. In fact, for many years C compilers on the
Intel x86 architecture used 16-bit integers and 32-bit pointers.

> map extremely well to Ada's storage pools and very poorly with C's
 > pointer arithmetic.

C's pointer arithmetic exists only within the confines of a single
array. Unless your Ada storage pools are planning to allocate single
objects with memory spanning separate devices, C's pointer arithmetic
model will be just fine.