Is an object made up of bytes?

[Doug Gwyn]

> The semantics of "(char *) &object" aren't guaranteed to produce anything
> that can be safely dereferenced to access a char.
> ... there may be "big endian" byte-addressed architectures where the
> numeric address of a word is not the lowest-valued address of the bytes
> within the word ...

I occurs to me that X3J11 needs to add a guarantee that at least a cast
to (void *) results in something representing the lowest-valued address
of any byte in the object pointed at by whatever pointer is being
converted; otherwise what good are the mem*() functions?

Some of the issues raised by RMS are deeper than I at first realized.