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From: garry@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Garry Wiegand)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: machines with oddball char * formats
Message-ID: <1534@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: Tue, 18-Nov-86 22:48:31 EST
Article-I.D.: batcompu.1534
Posted: Tue Nov 18 22:48:31 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Nov-86 05:47:53 EST
Reply-To: garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu
Organization: Cornell Engineering && Flying Moose Graphics
Lines: 20

In a recent article billw@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield) wrote:
>....  A variety of bytes sizes are used for Chars are variously
>7, 8 or 9 bits (7 allows efficient text packing 5 chars/word.  8 is
>what most people writing "portable" code assume a char has.  9 allows
>structs to be copied using say, cpystr, since it hits all the bits.)
>
>Personally, I feel that a mjor weakness of "C" as a "portable"
>language is its assumtion of byte addressability.
>...

Forgive my ignorance, but why don't the compiler writers on these "odd"
machines just designate a "char" and a "byte" to be the identical width
to a "short" ?   What will go wrong ?  

(Would very many real-life application programs actually be hurt by the 
added memory usage? - I'm excluding text editors!)

It seems so simple - give some memory, get a lot more speed.

garry wiegand   (garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu)