🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec20.201212.8974@lth.se> dag@bellman.control.lth.se (Dag Bruck) writes:
|The goal was to write data structures that use the ordering of
|pointers to improve search time.  What I need is mechanism that
|compares the pointers -- what they actually point to is not relevant.

On the contrary, you DO NOT then need such a mechanism, because alternate
approaches not using pointers can give you similar improvements to search times.

|C and C++ has some notion of equality between pointers.  You can
|clobber the semantics of this equality with memory mapping and what
|not, but that is in my view an issue beyond the language.

Agreed, as long as *you* stick to the C and C++ notion of equality
between pointers -- which is an extremely limited notion of equality.

|I would finally like to return to a claim I made earlier, but nobody
|has commented on (as far as I know).  I belive that even if you
|imposed a total ordering on pointers in a segmented architecture
|(e.g., Inte 8086 family), compilers would be able to handle the
|follwing common case efficiently:
|
|	void zap(int* a, unsigned n)
|	{
|		for (int* p = a; p < a+n; p++)
|			*p = 0;
|	}
|
|and produce the same code as today (without the total ordering).
|After all, the assignment "p = a" says that "p" must point to the same
|segment as "a".  Any comments?

You statement is true, but does not imply your intended conclusion, 
namely that thus one can efficiently implement total ordering.