Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Re: Re^3 (was 2): struct comparison
Message-ID: <10603@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 25 Jul 89 15:04:18 GMT
References: <167@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl> <12040019@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <12040019@hpfcdc.HP.COM> donn@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Donn Terry) writes:
>(Something has to give with off_t, and soon; 4Gb disks are coming along
>very soon.   It would be nice to find a way to deal with them without
>having to rewrite every use of off_t and lseek() in the world.  The
>ANSI C solution might work (I forget the names, but there is a solution
>for stdio), but it does require a lot of rewrite of existing applications.)

The natural and efficient representation for fpos_t (the generalization
of off_t) in virtually any large-system environment would be such that
special arithmetic is required to maintain properly normalized (block,
byte) information.  If unnormalized arithmetic is allowed, then you need
a special normalizing comparison operation.  It's considerations like
these that convinced many of us that the gain in supporting more extensive
structure operations directly in the language would not be worth the trouble.