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From: rcpieter@svin02.info.win.tue.nl (Tiggr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 64 bits--why stop there?
Message-ID: <1375@svin02.info.win.tue.nl>
Date: 31 Aug 90 06:26:55 GMT
References: <6106@vanuata.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <2437@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <631@array.UUCP> <225@csinc.UUCP> <1372@svin02.info.win.tue.nl> <141569@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1990Aug30.165552.3875@zoo.toronto.edu> <141658@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 13

lm@snafu.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy) writes:

|Anyway, the reason why not is so weird you'll die laughing.  Get this:
|On the ETA machine, rather than fixing the compiler so that a ++ on a char*
|incremented by 8 (bits) instead of one, they shifted bit addresses (the 
|natural address of the machine) into byte addresses when they stored them in
|pointers.  But they shifted back to bit addresses when shoving a pointer into
|an int.  Whay you ask?  God only knows, it certainly seemed weird to me.

So it is not a problem of a bit-adressing machine but of a braindead compiler.
Case solved.

Tiggr