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From: davidsen@steinmetz.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Naughty, naughty!
Message-ID: <1318@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Mar-87 15:52:00 EST
Article-I.D.: steinmet.1318
Posted: Mon Mar 23 15:52:00 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 25-Mar-87 05:50:28 EST
References: <883@cullvax.UUCP> <812@nrcvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 38

In article <812@nrcvax.UUCP% ihm@minnie.UUCP (Ian Merritt) writes:
%al@seismo.CSS.GOV@siac.UUCP writes:
%% the problem stems largely from the fact that an int 
%% is not the same size as a (char *).  the GNU code makes this 
%% general assumption, and it's probably is correct for any machine,
%% except for a '286.  

The problem stems from the fact that X3J11 and K&R agree that
assigning pointers to integers may lead to non-portability. When
writing portable code the only data object which may hold an
address is a pointer *to the same data type or void*. The fact
that may compilers allow this is not a good reason to do it.
%
%... or '186 or 8086.  It wouldn't be such a crime to refuse to support
%silly little toy architectures, except for the fact that there are
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
	and PDP-11??
%
%I saw a comment needling RMS for 'violating a primary rule of
%portability', but with the x86, Intel violates common sense enough to
%create far more portability issues than RMS's oversight.

If you want to put the heat in the right place, how about the
fact that all 80x86 C compilers allow 32 bit integers (long) and
no one has given the option to make the default size of int 32
bits? I (verbally) suggested this to Microsoft for their v3.0
compiler while it was in beta test, and was told that it would
make the code too slow. Not as slow as editing the source by
hand of reinventing the wheel! There are gobs of programs
written by people who were struggling so hard to make a program
work, or so ignorant of good coding practice, that they wrote
trash code which does something useful.

-- 
bill davidsen			sixhub \
      ihnp4!seismo!rochester!steinmetz ->  crdos1!davidsen
				chinet /
ARPA: davidsen%crdos1.uucp@ge-crd.ARPA (or davidsen@ge-crd.ARPA)