Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ginosko!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: More NULL questions
Message-ID: <11259@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 11 Oct 89 07:15:27 GMT
References: <5950001@hpldola.HP.COM> <443@shodha.dec.com> <903@abvax.UUCP> <448@shodha.dec.com>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <448@shodha.dec.com> devine@shodha.dec.com (Bob Devine) writes:
-In article <903@abvax.UUCP>, aep@ivan (Alex E. Pensky) writes:
-> Even if pointers and integers are the same size and have the same 
-> representation, you are still in trouble if your compiler passes int
-> parameters and pointer parameters via different mechanisms.
-  What different mechanisms?  C only supports call-by-value for
-parameters (I'm ignoring the special casing of arrays here).  How
-can pointers be passed differently than ints?  It sounds like you
-used a broken compiler.

[This list sure has been getting a lot of GUESSWORK posted to it recently.]

A simple example is that the first M integer parameters might be passed
in data registers and the first N pointer parameters passed in address
registers.  Yes, there are compilers that follow conventions like this,
and even stranger ones.  They are not "broken".