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Date:      Fri, 18 May 2001 11:35:02 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
To:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Cc:        cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/arm/include ansi.h src/sys/i386/include ansi.h src/sys/powerpc/include ansi.h
Message-ID:  <200105181535.LAA73284@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0105190101460.26239-100000@besplex.bde.org>
References:  <20010517225829.B68924@dragon.nuxi.com> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0105190101460.26239-100000@besplex.bde.org>

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<<On Sat, 19 May 2001 01:12:30 +1000 (EST), Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> said:

> According to wollman, POSIX (.1g) will require at least 8-bit chars
> (char == uint8_t).  Of course, the compiler can always fake it except
> for accesses to magic (device) memory.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that.  The networking
specification (.1g) was written to harmonize with C89, and required
the presence of a uint8_t which was subtly different from what was
eventually standardized in C99.  (Specifically, C99's version does not
allow padding bits -- i.e., bits in the memory representation which do
not participate in arithmetic operations -- whereas 1003.1g's version
does.)  The Austin Group was faced with a choice: we could invent lots
of new types and semantics for the networking functions in order to
work around the C99's more restrictive definition, or we could require
eight-bit characters.  Given the small and rapidly vanishing
population of non-eight-bit machines, most of which never ran anything
even vaguely like UNIX, we chose the latter option, so the current
draft now requires uint8_t, uint16_t, and uint32_t to exist.  The
principal opposition to this approach came not from old PDP-10
hackers, but from people who wanted *16*-bit characters.

-GAWollman




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