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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Is an object made up of bytes?
Message-ID: <5536@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 17-Jan-87 22:37:14 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.5536
Posted: Sat Jan 17 22:37:14 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Jan-87 23:46:28 EST
References: <2144@brl-adm.ARPA> <5497@brl-smoke.ARPA> <5527@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

> The semantics of "(char *) &object" aren't guaranteed to produce anything
> that can be safely dereferenced to access a char.
> ... there may be "big endian" byte-addressed architectures where the
> numeric address of a word is not the lowest-valued address of the bytes
> within the word ...

I occurs to me that X3J11 needs to add a guarantee that at least a cast
to (void *) results in something representing the lowest-valued address
of any byte in the object pointed at by whatever pointer is being
converted; otherwise what good are the mem*() functions?

Some of the issues raised by RMS are deeper than I at first realized.