🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MEISSNER.90Aug1191316@osf.osf.org> meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
>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.

In article <MCGRATH.90Aug1231443@paris.Berkeley.EDU> mcgrath@paris.Berkeley.EDU (Roland McGrath) writes:
>If it is not feasible to reorder members across class boundaries and still do
>subclassing and virtual functions right then no one will try to do it in their
>implementation.  That doesn't mean the standard should prevent people from
>trying if they want to.

Reordering does not have to go so far as to change the offsets of inherited
members.  The rule could be that new members can be placed in holes left by
padding in the superclass or in unused portions of storage units that
contain inherited bitfields.  I think this would do all the packing that
Jim Adcock originally wanted, without affecting current implementations of
inheritance.
   Since nothing in C corresponds to class inheritance, I don't see that
this introduces any incompatibility, either.  If you declare a struct, it
would be laid out just like a C struct.

    Glen Ditchfield  gjditchfield@violet.uwaterloo.ca  Office: DC 2517
Dept. of Computer Science, U of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
	      These opinions have not been tested on animals.