Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!wasatch!ee-sno
From: ee-sno@wasatch.utah.edu (Niel Orcutt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Looking for a decent C compiler
Message-ID: <2132@wasatch.utah.edu>
Date: 1 Jul 89 02:40:02 GMT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 13

I have both the MicroSoft C compiler v 5.1 and the Borland C compiler
version 2.0.  The MicroSoft C compiler stores huge pointers with
four bytes of value in the offset and one byte in the segment.  This
causes the problem mentioned by an earlier poster, that elements
in the structure stored in a huge area of memory should be arranged
such that an element at the end of a 64k boundary end exactly at the 
boundary; otherwise, the last element will be partly fetched from the
end of the 64k area and partly from the beginning of that same area.
This method, however, has the advantage that pointer renormalization
only needs to occur once every 64k.  The Borland compiler stores
four bytes of value in the segment and one byte in the offset; this
eliminates the above problem but causes that the pointer be renormalized
every 16 bytes.  I don't know how much slower this method is . . .