Re: Base64-Encoding

[Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <1192633784.534337.221490@e34g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,  Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com> writes:
> On Oct 17, 7:07 am, Stefan Bellon <sbel...@sbellon.de> wrote:
> 
>> Yes, I am not forced to exactly do it this way. In fact, there have
>> been discussions in this group explaining how to do it in several other
>> ways. I was just wondering because my idea initially looked like such an
>> elegant way. ;-)
> 
> It does seem like it would have been nice, and maybe it could be
> argued that some sort of standard representation clause or pragma
> should be added to give more control over how packed array elements
> are stored.  The problem is that it would have to work not only for
> big- and little-endian machines, but also on machines that are not
> byte-addressable---there are still a few of those around.

The value of a standardized pragma to solve a problem that is specific
to particular architectures is questionable.  In fact, it might be a
bad idea to have a standardized pragma since those porting to another
architecture might presume that no changes were required.