Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: What breaks? (was Re: 64 bit longs?)
Message-ID: <14914@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 21 Jan 91 21:04:34 GMT
References: <1991Jan18.044948.27943@zoo.toronto.edu> <14896@smoke.brl.mil> <1991Jan21.025706.7152@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <1991Jan21.025706.7152@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <14896@smoke.brl.mil> gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>>There is no portable way to declare a type with *exactly* 32 bits, ...
>>And there is no guarantee that such a type even exists...
>In that case, that machine is going to have real trouble declaring, say,
>a TCP header structure.  It is always possible to find machines so badly
>broken that you can't cope with them.

I don't agree that a machine whose integer types all have sizes different
from 32 bits is "broken".  I've implemented programs that had similar data
packing requirements on architectures that didn't match the packing
boundaries; it's a solvable problem, although one has to take more care
than most hackers feel they can be bothered with.