Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Determing alignment of (char *) pointer Message-ID: <7419@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Tue, 16-Dec-86 15:48:53 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.7419 Posted: Tue Dec 16 15:48:53 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 16-Dec-86 15:48:53 EST References: <1510@mit-trillian.MIT.EDU> <7381@utzoo.UUCP>, <579@mrstve.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 16 > ... I may very well be misunderstanding what's going on here, > but it appears to me that you're looking for a *machine-independent* way of > performing a *machine-specific* operation. None of the methods I've seen > (I may have missed a few) would work on a machine like the CDC 6600... The *methods* wouldn't work, but the general notion of "is a character pointer sufficiently well-aligned to be a valid pointer to something else" probably remains valid on the 6600 (which I admit I'm not very familiar with). It would not be unreasonable for a language like C to provide a primitive for determining this, although the implementation of the primitive would necessarily be machine-specific. [Note that this is *not* a call for adding such a primitive to C in particular. Right now we need less inno- vation in C's definition, not more.] -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry