machines with oddball char * formats

[Garry Wiegand]

In a recent article billw at navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield) wrote:
>....  A variety of bytes sizes are used for Chars are variously
>7, 8 or 9 bits (7 allows efficient text packing 5 chars/word.  8 is
>what most people writing "portable" code assume a char has.  9 allows
>structs to be copied using say, cpystr, since it hits all the bits.)
>
>Personally, I feel that a mjor weakness of "C" as a "portable"
>language is its assumtion of byte addressability.
>...

Forgive my ignorance, but why don't the compiler writers on these "odd"
machines just designate a "char" and a "byte" to be the identical width
to a "short" ?   What will go wrong ?  

(Would very many real-life application programs actually be hurt by the 
added memory usage? - I'm excluding text editors!)

It seems so simple - give some memory, get a lot more speed.

garry wiegand   (garry%cadif-oak at cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu)