🚀 go-pugleaf

Claus Hirth wrote:
> What still nags at me about the portability issue :
> Is there a machine still in use (Kurt, please name it)
> on which the representation of a
>         double *
> differs from the representation of a
>         char *
> ?

Well, I'm not Kurt, but as I recall the Data General Eclipse
series of computers used 32-bit byte addresses for (char *)
and 31-bit word addresses for (double *).  Word addresses had
to be left-shifted by one to create the equivalent byte address,
and vice versa.  (If I recall correctly, DG used the top
bit of a word address to do some funky indirect addressing.)

Caveat: this was back in my Fortran days; I don't think I
ever worked with a C compiler on that machine, but I don't
see how it could have avoided using different representations
for character pointers and other pointers.