Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!microsoft!jimad
From: jimad@microsoft.UUCP (Jim ADCOCK)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Subject: Re: "packed" objects
Message-ID: <56735@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 20 Aug 90 17:21:18 GMT
References: <56165@microsoft.UUCP> <1030@lupine.NCD.COM> <56637@microsoft.UUCP> <1227@lupine.NCD.COM>
Reply-To: jimad@microsoft.UUCP (Jim ADCOCK)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 19

In article <1227@lupine.NCD.COM> rfg@NCD.COM (Ron Guilmette) writes:
|I consider these to be two different problems.  Packing fields within a
|struct (or class) is something I can do perfectly well right now with
|C, thank you.  If C++ would just stick to its roots in this respect I
|would have all of the control that I need to take care of packing the
|fields within a struct (or class) myself.
|
|The problem of packing across inheritance boundaries is a different
|matter however.  This is an entirely new problem in C++, and (I feel)
|it needs to have a proper solution so that the programmer can (once
|again) be in complete control over data structure layout.  (Right now,
|he's not because the current de-facto standard doesn't mandate anything
|in particular about the packing, or lack thereof, which occurs at these
|boundaries.)

Okay, sounds interesting.  How about a proposal about how this should
work?  I'd like to propose that your suggestion should still allow
portability across machines with differing packing strategies, and should
not be onerous to people who aren't interested in these details....