"peternilsson42" <peternilsso...@...> wrote:
> "Sharma, Hans Raj \(London\)" <hansraj_sharma@> wrote:
> > I have never seen difference in the sizeof(char *) and
> > sizeof(int *).
> > Is there any such system with a difference?
>
> Why do you care? What advantage would you gain from them
> necessarily being the same?
>
> The point is that the language standards allow them to be
> different. There have certainly been implementations where
> int and void pointers had different representations.
"The issue is is that pointers of different types can have
different sizes. E.g. sizeof(int *) could be different to
sizeof(char *). Consider an archirecture that is word
addressed i.e. a native address representation can only
select a specific word in memory. That would be fine for,
say, int * but if the C implementation wanted to support
bytes that were smaller than the system's word it would
have to supply extra information in C pointer type such
as char * in order to select the particular byte within a
word. In that case sizeof(char *) may be larger than
sizeof(int *)."
-- Lawrence Kirby in comp.lang.c
--
Peter
