On 1/29/2013 8:48 AM, deadalnix wrote:
Is that a practical limitation ? All widespread arch I know assembly for are 2 complement, and it seems like something settled now in the field. Or am I unaware of some important stuff ?
One's complement machines existed when I was a wee laddie, but I haven't heard of any since.
C (and C++) also "support" things like bytes that are larger than 8 bits. Yes, there are >8 bit byte CPUs in the form of specialized DSP processors, and yes, there are C compilers for them.
But I can't think of a single non-trivial C program that could be compiled for greater than 8 bit bytes without extensive refactoring, so having Standard C "support" such is mostly an exercise in theater and is useless in real life.
Even worse is all the millions of man-hours wasted in (usually incorrectly) trying to make C code portable to theoretical C compilers that have ints larger than 32 bits, etc., trying to ensure that modern C code will work on a 16 bit C compiler, and on and on.
By defining these problems out of existence, D achieves a major simplification in terms of programming bugs that are far more theoretical than real.
One real issue is order of evaluation bugs, but I didn't see a note about that in the Clang list.
