Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!ucla-cs!oahu!frazier From: frazier@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Greg Frazier) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: MIPS, Compaq and Microsoft in bed - NYT story Message-ID: Date: 11 Feb 91 17:52:04 GMT References: <29920@usc> <45758@mips.mips.COM> <3188@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Sender: news@cs.ucla.edu (Shemp News Account) Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department Lines: 29 Nntp-Posting-Host: oahu.cs.ucla.edu davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes: +In article <45758@mips.mips.COM> cprice@mips.COM (Charlie Price) writes: +| If you have big addresses, presumably you want to be able to +| manipulate them easily and that means same-sized registers +| and integer operations. [stuff deleted] + And honestly, other languages which have pointers are not usually used +to perform these atrocities. Other languages seem to be able to convince +programmers that a pointer is not an int. + I really can't accept your idea that the size of an int must be the +same as the size of an address. I seem to remember a DG machine in which +the pointers were 48 bits, and several machines where the pointers are +not in the format of ordinal values of consecutively numbered bytes. +These machines exist and run, C and all the other usual languages. Umm, I think you missed the point. Whether or not you allow the user to manipulate pointers as integers, you will still have to be able to perform integer arithmetic on addresses. Unless there is some other way to calculate the address of a[i], that is. -- Greg Frazier frazier@CS.UCLA.EDU !{ucbvax,rutgers}!ucla-cs!frazier Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com