Re: I need a new compiler...

docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

It may well be that the ISO or IEEE or ANSI or whatever standard does not
require a version of C to have access to lower levels of memory... but if
all versions have capabilities for such access, and many advantages are
taken in many versions of such access... well, something about walking and
quacking like a duck comes to mind.

Since this empirical test is trivially shown to fail, it's a moot point.

Many C implementations execute in a process-virtual environment, so at
best they can only provide access to process virtual memory. Maybe
that's "low-level" to some, but there are a great many turtles below it.

There are C implementations where pointers are not machine addresses
at all, notably the various implementations for the AS/400. On those
machines, C pointers were 128-bit tokens that identified objects in
the single-level store, but they did not contain machine addresses,
which were 64- or 65-bit (for the CISC- and RISC-architecture machines
respectively).

When C99 was first approved, Peter Seebach claimed to be the only
conforming implementation. He spoke in jest, of course, but he had a
copy of the standard and fit the definition. And while it's hard to
prove this definitively, I suspect most phenomenologists would tell
you that few of us have low-level access to our own memories.

--
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
.

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