struct accessing

[bob larson]

In article <1411 at garcon.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdaniel at uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu (Tim McDaniel) writes:
>There is a special dispensation, though: "If a pointer to a structure
>is cast to the type of a pointer to its first member, the result
>refers to the first member".  [8.3]

There is at least one current (non-ansi) compiler that does not do this
currently, and will be forced to have extra overhead if the first structure
member is a char.  Prime 50 series computers arn't byte addressable%, and
the ix mode C compiler avoids the overhead of bit field insert/extract
on char variables not part of an array by treating them as shorts.  (char
is unsigned by default, signed char will be rather nasty to implement.)

64v mode C on the Prime puts char variables in the left side of a 16 bit
word, thus using both more time and memory than needed.

% The ix instruction set does have instructions designed for use from C
that do try to fake byte addressing.  Unfortunatly, most of the overhead
of the bit field insert/extract is still there.

-- 
Bob Larson	Arpa:	blarson at basil.usc.edu
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