the one and only objection to C

[Ken Yap]

***** Asbestos suit on *****
There are two things which come to mind here:

(1) I have seen an implementation of Pascal which allowed the
programmer to specify the byte offset of each field. Thus the
programmer gets complete control over the packing in the
record/structure. (Even overlapping fields were possible. Ick!) The
"packed" pragma would be the special case where the offsets are
consecutive.

(2) In most programs, it is irrelevant how the fields are arranged in
the record and the programmer doesn't care. There could be another
pragma that told the compiler to arrange the fields to minimize record
size. This can be done by allocating storage to the largest fields
first, ending with byte-sized (or even bit-sized) objects. Naturally
this pragma should be turned off for compiling device drivers.

Further to point (2), it seems that people who write device drivers are
making assumptions about how their compiler aligns fields. Given that
the drivers are not portable anyway, this is not an issue.  There may
be a case for making (2) the default behavior and making programmers
use mechanism (1) for field alignment. A plus would be the extra
information conveyed to driver modifiers.

Ok, flame away.
-- 
	Ken Yap

UUCP: (..!{allegra, decvax, seismo}!rochester!ken) ARPA: ken at rochester.arpa
USnail:	Dept. of Comp. Sci., U. of Rochester, NY 14627. Voice: Ken!