From -6218099832497401603 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f78e5,9684813612e15361 X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public From: Scott Meyers Subject: Re: pointers: sizeof(pointer) Date: 1998/06/27 Message-ID: <35942D10.24F0@aristeia.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 366568729 Approved: Fergus Henderson Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <6mkkaq$dgu@engnews1.Eng.Sun.COM> <3591A612.15DA@aristeia.com> <6mu1lq$fon@engnews1.Eng.Sun.COM> <35930246.1692@noSPAM.central.beasys.com> X-Original-Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 23:22:36 GMT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: - X-Auth: PGPMoose V1.1 PGP comp.std.c++ iQBFAgUANZTaheEDnX0m9pzZAQEeBgGAnFlbtSMOKqXq3X3czQZUwSKjt+ak/qdB hkfwBj7DxbYB1nmKkMgk6Fn9v3XFL2II =5vot MIME-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 16:22:36 PDT Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ David R Tribble wrote: > Leave it to Microsoft to come up with a different, and inherently > worse, solution. I believe that they think of themselves as being I like dumping on Microsoft (or IBM or Sun or HP...) as much as anybody, because, well, because it's fun to pick on companies. However, I got the impression from Pietrek's article that Microsoft made its decision based on the kinds of technical considerations Steve described for Sun and you described for DEC. From Matt's article: The second scenario for a 64-bit type model is ... leave the int as 32 bits while using 64 bits for longs and pointers. This is the model that 64-bit Unix implementations use. For Unix, [this] is a good choice from the portability perspective, since most Unix APIs use int parameters, rather than longs. Windows, on the other hand, uses lots of types that ultimately resolve down to a long, and hence would be 64 bits in this model. For this reason, a [64-bit long] Windows implementation would have many of the same probams as the [64-bit int] model. In addition, code that currently gets away with assuming that ints and longs are equivalent would break under [the 32-bit int, 64-bit long] model. Of course, it's possible that this seemingly-technical justification is a smokescreen crafted by Chris Carter and his X-File cronies to hide the REAL reason for doing things this way, but then again, maybe not. Scott -- Scott Meyers, Ph.D. Voice: 503/638-6028 C++ Consulting and Training Fax: 503/638-6614 Author of "Effective C++" Email: smeyers@aristeia.com and "More Effective C++" WWW: http://www.aristeia.com/ --- [ comp.std.c++ is moderated. To submit articles, try just posting with ] [ your news-reader. If that fails, use mailto:std-c++@ncar.ucar.edu ] [ --- Please see the FAQ before posting. --- ] [ FAQ: http://reality.sgi.com/austern_mti/std-c++/faq.html ]