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From: billw@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: machines with oddball char * formats
Message-ID: <1106@navajo.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 19-Nov-86 19:48:25 EST
Article-I.D.: navajo.1106
Posted: Wed Nov 19 19:48:25 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Nov-86 22:43:01 EST
References: <1534@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 21
Summary: give up 77% of memory ?

In article <1534@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>, garry@batcomputer) writes:
> 
> 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.
> 

this is a word addressable machine.  A short is 36 bits.  Giving up
some memory for the sake of speed is one thing, but you are talking
about wasting 77% of the memory.  Given paging, it probably wouldn't
even be faster.  For typical C code dealing with character stings or
arrays, the byte operations asren't that much slower than individual
memory moves, given cache, and the fact that the byte instructions
auto-increment, and memory instructions don't.

BillW