pointer representation (was: Re: effect of free())

[Barry Margolin]

In article <2075 at munnari.oz.au> ok at cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
>  My point is that optimising compilers
>generally assume that "equals may be subsituted for equals" (that's what
>equality is all about), so that *correct* source code is very likely to be
>incorrectly *optimised*.

If the optimizer for an architecture where pointers may compare equal
but not be completely equivalent were to perform such a
transformation, it would be a buggy optimizer.  You appear to be
assuming a system-independent optimizer; what you've done is point out
why such a thing is not really a good idea.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar