Re: Size changes, round 1

[Geoff Keating <geoffk at cygnus dot com>]

kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) writes:

> I'm usually the first person to argue for robustness, but I simply
> disagree that merging these two different fields will increase
> robustness: indeed I feel quite the contrary: it will make things much
> harder to maintain because every new way of updating the sizes will
> require a new function to be added and used just in one place.

The reason I would prefer that this be dealt with using some kind of
abstracted data type is that it is extremely likely that in the future
we will want to, again, change the way we represent offsets in structures.

For instance, we might decide that we will represent everything by the
number of bits, and just use 'long long' when available to support
large structures.  This is not unreasonable because GCC itself does
not need structures larger than 2^31 bits, and GCC supports 'long
long' so when built with itself it will have full functionality.
(Many vendor compilers also support 'long long', and it is in the new
C standard, so I expect it will almost always be a non-issue.)

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com>