>>> -spc (Wish the C standard committee had the balls to say "2's >>> complement all the way, and a physical bit pattern of all 0s is a >>> NULL pointer" ... ) >> As far as I'm concerned, this is different only in degree from `Wish >> the C standard committee had the balls to say "Everything is x86".'.
> First off, can you supply a list of architectures that are NOT 2's > complement integer math that are still made and in active use today? > Second, are there any architectures still commercially available and > used today where an all-zero bit pattern for an address *cannot* be > used as NULL? What's the relevance? You think the C spec should tie itself to the idiosyncracies of today's popular architectures? > [3] I only bring this up because you seem to be assuming my > position is "all the world's on x86" No, I don't think that's your position. I'm using that as a satirical exaggeration of your position. If I'd been writing this twenty years ago, I would have written "VAX" instead, because that was the machine widely assumed at the time. > And because of this, I checked some of your C code and I > noticed you used 0 and 1 as exit codes, which, pedantically > speaking, isn't portable. %SYSTEM-W-NORMAL, normal successful completion. My code makes no pretense to portability to all dialects of C. (Well, most of it; there might be a little that is supposed to be that portable, but I can't think of anything offhand.) Besides exit codes, I assume ints are relatively large (a significant fraction of my code will explode badly on <32-bit ints) and that the underlying system is basically Unix. Some of it should work on anything POSIX. Relatively little of it will work on non-POSIX C implementations. Some of it even calls for NetBSD with my patches applied (eg, anything depending on AF_TIMER sockets). > Yes, I'll admit this might be a low blow here ... Perhaps. But I don't see it as relevant. It's a long way from "much of my code is restricted to $CLASS_OF_ENVIRONMENTS" to "I think the C standard should write off anything outside $CLASS_OF_ENVIRONMENTS". /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B