Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!oberon!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!labrea!rocky!rokicki
From: rokicki@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas Rokicki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Structure alignment in Manx C
Message-ID: <1045@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 14 Feb 88 06:56:56 GMT
References: <8802140413.AA17411@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 19
Summary: I beg to differ

dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
> > (Manx don't put longword entities on longword boundaries . . .)
> 	It might not be preferable, but can hardly be called a bug.  
> Remember that warning a lonnngg time ago about declaring such items as
> FileInfoBlocks auto?  You can't for the very reason that they require
> longword alignment and since longwords don't, no assumption can be made
> as to the alignment the compiler used.

Any compiler for a 68000/68020 machine, that does not do everything
reasonable to put longword structures on longword boundaries, is buggy.
Period.  The Amiga is most certainly a 68000/68020 machine.  I wonder
how much slower those 68020 machines run because all of the Manx
compiled commercial software (at least those with 16-bit ints) don't
have their longwords aligned correctly?

The costs are absolutely minimal, with the sole exception of passing
mixed longword and 16-bit arguments to functions, in which case the
costs are fair.  I can't imagine any excuse for such behavior.

-tom