William T Wilson wrote: > But then no one derives any real > benefit from having 0x37 placed at offset 0.
That depends what memory address 0 is used for in the target platform. It may be a significant thing to the CPU, or to some memory-mapped peripheral, and therefore to the kernel. This is one reason that C is a useful language for hardware drivers and similarly low-level things. The value of address 0 isn't something a user-level app should have to worry about, though. > Representing human concepts in a computer is the central purpose of > programming. Yes. On the one hand, low-level tools are essential for creating frameworks in which higher-level tools can operate. But the higher-level tools are the source of the computer's value. Nobody except OS researchers buys a computer just to run device drivers and memory managers on it; the real value of a computer to most people is the ability to use it for tasks which essentially have nothing to do with the computer, but which the computer makes easier, or can do faster, or less expensively. Craig
