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[Michael Meissner]

In article <2263 at milton.acs.washington.edu>
khan at milton.acs.washington.edu (I Wish) writes:

| In article <2353 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
| 
| >The reasons are similar to the arguments about not using goto. calloc works
| >fine and is portable. Whether or not you use it is a religious issue.
| 
| [...]
| 
| >And no, I don't care about machines where 0.0 and NULL are not 0 bit
| >patterns. If someday I should be unfortunate enough to run across one,
| >I'll worry about it then!
| 
| Calloc will set up a zero-bit pattern on any machine....  if you are
| depending on this meaning floating-point zero or the null pointer, then
| it won't do that some machines, so it can't be called "portable."
| 
| (As an aside, does a VAX, with floating-point descriptors or whatever
|  it uses, treat zero-bytes as float 0.0?)

I believe that the only machine in the world whose floating point
format for 0.0 contains 1 bits is one of the old Honeywell computers
(at least that's what was mentioned in X3J11).

At one point, the designers for the S1 machine (or language, it's been
at least a year since I saw the newspost), toyed with making the NULL
pointer contain 1 bits.  When I was at Data General, I toyed with
OR'ing in the current ring for the pointer at one point as well, as
well, and eventually gave up on the idea.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA

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