bitsize() operator (was: The D Programming Language)

[ELIN Forsch.z.]

In article <664 at viper.Lynx.MN.Org> john at viper.UUCP (John Stanley) writes:
>
>  While I'm totaly against changing the existing functionality of the
>sizeof() operator, what I would be totaly in favor of would be the
>addition-to-ansi-C of a new operator that would have a similar
>functionality, but which would return the number of -bits- in
>something.  The name bitsize() would be my suggested name for this
>operator.
>
>  This would provide one MAJOR advantage.  It would allow writing code
>or header files that would be 100% portable without having to know
>about each and every compiler/OS/machine's identifer defines.  

This seems superflous to me. ANSI guarantees sizeof(char) to be 1 and
provides  a macro in <limits.h> named CHAR_BIT that expands to the number
of bits used for one char. So the number of bits for a specific data type
is simply sizeof(SpecificDataType)*CHAR_BIT.

>If you
>needed a 12 bit integer type, your headers could have #if statements
>that would provide the next integer type equal or larger that 12 bits.
>No more #ifdef'ing special integer types individualy for each system 
>when you're trying to make efficient code run on multiple machines.

You cannot use the sizeof operator in #if expressions as the preporcessor
does not know anything about types. Symetrically it would not know anything
about bit sizes. I cannot see, how you would be able to use bitsize during
preprocessing.

>
>  An additional minor advantage would be the capability of writing
>the kinds of functions we normaly use sizeof for to work with bitfield
>variables..
>
>  This is a relatively minor addition to any existing compiler
>(multiply sizeof by 8 for most machines... and return the bitsize
>that's probably already a field in the evaluation structure for a
>bitfield variable...) and would make some major advancements possible
>in source code portability...

Try the following:
#define bitsize(whatever) sizeof(whatever)*CHAR_BIT
This has only one disadvantage: you are not able to use a syntax without
parentheses as you can with sizeof (e.g. sizeof "a text").

My opinion is, not to create operators too freely. In C operators have been
chosen in a way, that (nearly) every operator yields in one processor operation
(+, -, ...) or a constant (sizeof). This helps when one has to estimate about
the runtime of a program. For this reason I dislike operators that yield
(always) in functions like power, sin, etc. bitsize does not fall into this
category, but into category of not needed. Anyway such a new operator could
start an inflation that "optimizes away" some nice philosophies of C.

			Dietmar Weickert,
				ALCATEL-ELIN Research Center, Vienna, Austria.

P.S.: I apologize if my English is of unreadable style!