Re: Supporting byte-addressability on word-addressed hardware

markt@harlequin.co.uk (Mark Tillotson) writes:
> lehotsky@tiac.net (Alan Lehotsky) wrote:
> > I'm beginning a project to modify a gcc port to a machine that only
> > support 32-bit word addressed memory. At present, the port treats
> > ints, shorts and chars as the same size objects.
>
> Is this current scheme actually a problem??? How much space really is
> wasted? Is it significant? Is speed or size more important anyhow?


Depends very much on the applications you compile, of course. Typical
numerical code should not be affected very much, but just imagine compiling
a text editor with such a compiler --- using up four times the necessary
space could be seen as a mis-feature. (You might want to treat arrays
specially, but with C this doesn't work so well, since you can't know
whether your pointer points to an ordinary char (=long) or to a "packed"
char (=a byte). You might want to introduce pointer descriptors to
work around this... that way lies madness ;-)


[..]


-- Markus
--

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