malloc impossible?

[Tainter]

In article <9351 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>Assuming that integers could not also live in floating-point space,
>C would not be implementable on such a hypothetical architecture.

Sure it can.  Just not efficiently.

>Consider
>	union	{
>		double	d;
>		int	i;
>	}	u;
>	u.d = 123.0;
>	printf("%d\n", u.i);
>This is required to work, although the specific value printed of course
>depends on details of numeric representation on the specific system.
>All data object types in C must be able to live in the same kind of space.
>Whatever kind of space that is, is what one would parcel out via malloc().
>Therefore malloc() is implementable if C is (at the very least, along the
>lines I indicated in my previous example implementation).

This isn't even required to print anything useful.

To support this stuff you just give everything an indirection.

I haven't thought it completely through but I think this can be fleshed out
and even support malloc().


--johnathan.a.tainter