From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Michael.Young@CMU-CS-A@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: Information on Unix/Vax peculiarities
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.4758
Posted: Thu Dec  9 06:18:29 1982
Received: Fri Dec 10 07:43:08 1982

From: Michael Wayne Young <Michael.Young@CMU-CS-A>
Date:  4 December 1982 1926-EST (Saturday)
I fully disagree that "pointers, plus ints, should be of the same size"...
at least if you mean we should be able to assume so for writing
machine-independent code.  I'd like the C language to NOT define
the size of pointers, ints, or anything else.  About the only
restrictions I'd like to have placed is that a
	long is bigger than a normal int, (or same size),
	short is shorter (or same size),
	and an int is at least capable of taking a character.

Mixing int's and pointers is just plain machine-dependent (and 
probably not lint-free without some clever casting).

[I'd still be interested in an answer to Doug Gwyn's question:
are there architectures for which pointers to characters aren't
the smallest pointers?  Also, I would be interested in seeing
the architecture for which a pointer is larger than an int,
but I'm not about to claim (or base my code on the fact) that
no such machine exists.]

Let's not go about making unnecessary (or at least limitedly
valuable) assumptions about our machine architectures while
we code...

			Michael