-bp
-- # bryan at terran dot org # http://www.terran.org/~bryan---------- Forwarded message ---------- Subject: Re: size_t definition : Intel v Alpha Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 22:19:48 -0700 From: B. James Phillippe <bryan@terran.org> To: Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd@zip.com.au> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system
On Sat, 25 Sep 1999, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> On Intel size_t is unsigned int but on Alpha it is > unsigned long. I can understand why it is unsigned long > on Alpha, but not why it is unsigned int on Intel. ... > Can anybody explain this?
This has bugged me before, too, when porting code to my Alpha.
It comes from the Linux kernel includes <asm/posix_types.h> and <linux/types.h>. Personally I think it's a mistake in the kernel definitions, to be different C data types across architectures. It's fine for the sizes of a native type to differ; if "long" is a different number of bytes or byte-order on some other architecture. But when the data types themselves are different in the headers, you have problems when using abstract data types (eg. size_t). Effectively it's like saying that foo() takes an int on x86 and a long on Alpha (or Sparc64, or PPC, or ...). IMO it would be most proper if size_t were defined as unsigned long on all architectures.
-bp
-- # bryan at terran dot org # http://www.terran.org/~bryan
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