🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MCGRATH.90Aug1122802@helen.Berkeley.EDU>
mcgrath@helen.Berkeley.EDU (Roland McGrath) writes:

| The only arguments I have heard against arbitrary reordering of structures are
| that it is incompatible with C, and that it makes writing structures to files
| less portable.
| 
| Being incompatible with C is not something I consider a valid reason for not
| doing something.  That's why we have `extern "C"'.  A structure declared within
| `extern "C"' would, of course, obey C's conventions and not get reordered.
| 
| Writing structures to files as they appear in memory is not portable anyway.
| Even given the same machine (and thus the same sizes for the basic types and
| the same byte and word orders), different compilers (or even different compiler
| options) may use different padding in structures.
| 
| Are there any other arguments against allowing arbitrary reordering of
| structures?

Hmm, don't you care about compatibility with things like system calls?
I imagine the grief people would get if the stat structure got
rearranged because some OS jock added a byte field at the end of the
structure?  Yes, extern "C" can be used, but it just means that there
are even more things to worry about getting right.

Also, it would seem to me that reordering things across class
boundaries is a really bad idea -- then subclassing and virtual
functions would have no chance of working.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner@osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA

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