Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: 64 bit architectures and C/C++
Message-ID: <1991May24.164926.28988@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Fri, 24 May 1991 16:49:26 GMT
References: <45690005@hpcupt3.cup.hp.com> <16103@smoke.brl.mil> <314@orac.UUCP> <4383@inews.intel.com>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <4383@inews.intel.com> bhoughto@pima.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>More to the point:  the driver developer is going to be
>doing many things more heinous than bit-fields...
>ANSI C is specifically not designed for that sort of work.

Au contraire; C was designed for that sort of work from the beginning,
since that was its first major application, and ANSI C did not break this.
One needs to be a bit careful nowadays about using things like "volatile",
since modern C compilers are much more aggressive than the DMR original
that was used to rewrite the Unix kernel in C, but that's a detail.

>Such things are often better done in assembler, anyway
>(regardless of ease-of-maintenance).

They are *almost* always better done in C.  Given a good compiler, it's
rare for something to be doable in assembler but not in C.
-- 
And the bean-counter replied,           | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"beans are more important".             |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry