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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