Abstracting pointer arithmetic

[Neil Booth]

Richard Kenner wrote:-

> For *those* machines you can define Pmode as a different class.  I thought
> you were proposing doing it for *all* machines in order to support those.

I'd like to add my two cents here, though I have no real understanding
of the issues in the guts of the compiler.

Am I right in thinking that in GCC we do far too much on an ad-hoc
basis, with lots of special cases with if statements, and / or mega
switch statements?  I would have thought that many of these things
would be better and more robustly done through some kind of interface,
say a whole bunch of virtual functions accessed through function
pointers, and overridable by those architectures to which the general
methodology does not apply?

Or am I way off base here without a clue?

Neil.