Why no arithmetic on void *
Doug Gwyn
gwyn at smoke.brl.mil
Sat Jan 26 04:51:22 AEST 1991
In article <279D93D3.5EE7 at tct.uucp> chip at tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>"sizeof(char)==1" is hard-coded into innumerable calls to fread() and
>other library functions.
I had to figure out the ramifications when I wrote my "short char" proposal.
Actually there are enough problems with use of fread() etc. that I don't
think much more work would be needed to accommodate sizeof(char)>1 than
is already necessary to properly include <stdio.h>, use size_t, etc. Also
note that in any implementation where it was decided to make sizeof(char)
remain 1, the existing usage would not be a problem. For quite some time
I had been writing code that did not assume sizeof(char)==1, just in case.
Now that the standard requires sizeof(char)==1, I don't think there is any
real chance that it will ever change, so one can safely assume that
constraint.
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