Re: A curiosity...

[Samuel Tardieu <sam@rfc1149.net>]

>>>>> "Ludovic" == Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

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

Certainly not. For example, on a x86_64 Linux machine with GCC, you
can try the following snippet (untested):

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
  printf("integer size is %d, pointer size is %d\n",
         sizeof(int), sizeof(void*));
  return 0;
}

You should get respectively 4 and 8.

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

Nah, this is a FUD. If you want to use an integer type in C which is
compatible with addresses, you should use "size_t" explicitely, not
any other integer type (though I know of no architecture where
"unsigned long" is not the same as "size_t" even though this is
allowed).

  Sam
-- 
Samuel Tardieu -- sam@rfc1149.net -- http://www.rfc1149.net/