Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think!paperboy!meissner From: meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: FREE Message-ID: Date: 5 Mar 90 20:24:36 GMT References: <1990Mar1.140829.17199@druid.uucp> <2353@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <2263@milton.acs.washington.edu> Sender: news@OSF.ORG Organization: Open Software Foundation Lines: 35 In-reply-to: khan@milton.acs.washington.edu's message of 5 Mar 90 16:47:10 GMT In article <2263@milton.acs.washington.edu> khan@milton.acs.washington.edu (I Wish) writes: | In article <2353@dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes: | | >The reasons are similar to the arguments about not using goto. calloc works | >fine and is portable. Whether or not you use it is a religious issue. | | [...] | | >And no, I don't care about machines where 0.0 and NULL are not 0 bit | >patterns. If someday I should be unfortunate enough to run across one, | >I'll worry about it then! | | Calloc will set up a zero-bit pattern on any machine.... if you are | depending on this meaning floating-point zero or the null pointer, then | it won't do that some machines, so it can't be called "portable." | | (As an aside, does a VAX, with floating-point descriptors or whatever | it uses, treat zero-bytes as float 0.0?) I believe that the only machine in the world whose floating point format for 0.0 contains 1 bits is one of the old Honeywell computers (at least that's what was mentioned in X3J11). At one point, the designers for the S1 machine (or language, it's been at least a year since I saw the newspost), toyed with making the NULL pointer contain 1 bits. When I was at Data General, I toyed with OR'ing in the current ring for the pointer at one point as well, as well, and eventually gave up on the idea. -- Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861 Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA Catproof is an oxymoron, Childproof is nearly so