Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!mcsun!unido!mikros!mwtech!martin
From: martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Cnews on System V/AT: "expression causes compiler loop"
Message-ID: <480@mwtech.UUCP>
Date: 23 Nov 89 09:29:12 GMT
References: <3056@splut.conmicro.com> <1989Nov20.181839.1546@utzoo.uucp> <1676@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1063@east.East.Sun.COM> <1989Nov21.17513
Reply-To: martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel)
Organization: MIKROS Systemware, Darmstadt/W-Germany
Lines: 20

In article <1989Nov21.175136.3418@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
[lines deleted]
>If we could have assumed an ANSI implementation, the whole issue would go
>away, because we wouldn't have to supply our own offsetof().

Did you ever think about the following alternative to offsetof():

1) Instead of offsetof() use #defined constants.
2) When 'make'ing the programm, *automatically* generate an
   #include-file with the required #defines by
   2a) compile and run a programm, which calculates
       the offset by taking the difference of the
       struct.component-s adress and the struct-s adress,
       after casting both to char*

IMHO this should be portable within all flavours of C-Compilers.

BTW: I myself did not invent this approach, but I've forgotten where
I read it (in some really good book about C-Programming - don't like
to walk to my board of C books now :-) ).