🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6785@netxcom.DHL.COM> ewiles@netxcom.DHL.COM (Edwin Wiles) writes:

	   A) You would not be guaranteed that a data file written by a given
	   program on one machine, would be readable by the same program compiled
	   on a different machine under a different implementation of C++.
	   (Assuming that hardware and byte ordering are the same, the order
	   of structure/class elements wouldn't necessarily be the same.)

The ability for a compiler to re-order the elements of structures/unions is a
useful optimization.  I would argue that any code which writes structures to
a data file is non-portable.  If data is to be portable it should *always* be
written element by element, preferably in ASCII.  The programmer should never
assume specific structure ordering, except in the case of bit field
specifications, which can override the compiler's defaults.

This is the sort of hackery which causes many C programs to fail!
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Jeremy Webber			   ACSnet: jeremy@chook.ua.oz
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