From: utzoo!decvax!cca!zrm.mit-ccc@Mit-Mc@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re:  Information on Unix/Vax peculiarities
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.4626
Posted: Sun Dec  5 06:22:30 1982
Received: Mon Dec  6 05:12:52 1982

Date: 1 Dec 1982 00:58:20-EST
I would like to know on what sort of machine you can't put a pointer
into an int. Not being able to do that raises all sorts of problems such
as not being able to subscript for large arrays or offsets, having the
size of function arguments and return values NOT be the sizeof(int),
having strange things happen in registers (ints should also have the
same size as the registers you'll most often put them in), especially if
your int suddenly becomes a long in a register, or if a (char *) gets
truncated because it was run through an integer register.

I guess what it all boils down to is that all pointers, plus ints, should
be of the same size, since these are the objects you are going to want
to put into interchangable slots the most often. Since you have the
datatypes long and short, you can also provide the programmer convenient
ways of accessing longer or shorter types of int-like objects. But if
someone has done this some other way, I'd like to hear about it.

Cheers,
Zig