🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <43bdus$l2g@nntp.nta.no>, ohk@hal.nta.no (Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen TF.E/DELAB) writes:
>
> What worries me is that there does not seem to be a clean way to ensure that a
> record has a specific *physical* layout. If it is to be used for systems
> programming, I think this is an important feature, because there is often a need
> to interface to devices which expect to use a fixed data format.
>
One of my pet peeves, too. It isn't just for systems programming, either.
Often you have to work with 'legacy' data constructs, and need to utilize
the detail bit-and-byte layout.

For some reason, portability has come to mean, "Hide all knowledge of the
bit-and-byte level." This is a bit of a fallacy, as you are really trying
to hide the effects of the machine archtecture. Bits-and-bytes are really
abstract concepts, independent of architecture, and shouldn't be hidden.
Probably it most hits the road when you consider element alignment within
a structure. Even there you probably want and need to know such things
for performance reasons, as well as be able to read structures that are
stored in binary form in files.

Dale Pontius
(NOT speaking for IBM)