What is sin_zero for?

[chris at %griffon]

In article <JIM.90Oct17174526 at baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> jim at cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid) writes:
>In article <MJD.90Oct16130739 at saul.cis.upenn.edu> mjd at saul.cis.upenn.edu (Mark-Jason Dominus) writes:
>
>   The defininition of struct sockaddr_in in the <netinet/in.h>
>   files on our suns has four members, one of which is 
>		   char sin_zero[8];
>
>   What is it for?
>
>Nothing. It's purely to pad out the sockaddr_in struct to 16 bytes,
>the size of the generic sockaddr structure in <sys/socket.h>.
>
>		Jim


Actually, it's a little-known fact of Unix history that the "8" in "sin_zero[8]"
is really an infinity symbol, placed vertically due to lack of an appropriate
ascii character.  The significance of all this is although original Unix direct
from the Hand of the Creator was pure and without sin, the Berkeley variants
took on the knowledge of evil as well as good, thus acquiring Infinite 
Original Sin...

(;-), for the humour-impaired)
-- 
"In the beginning was the Word -- no, just a sec, | Chris Robertson
 the Byte, no, the Bit... oh hell, forget it!"    | chris%griffon at mcc.oz