🚀 go-pugleaf

Somewhere along the evolution of C this type of expressions where made illegal:
	char	*p = ...;
	p &= ~1;

the workaround:
	p = (char *) ((int)p & ~1);

makes my code:
	- harder to write
	- less portable because it assumes that there is an integral type
	  (if not "int", "long") that has enough precision (bits) so that
	  the casts will be harmless.

I understand that (in theory) any code that does bitwise logical
operations (|, &, ~, etc.) is not portable because it is somehow interpreting
the representation of the pointer while doing such manipulations.  In practice,
for the type of work that I do (writing operating systems) and for the class
of machines that I'm interested in (machines with large flat virtual
address spaces)
I don't need to worry about machines with bizare addressing machanisms.

Could the people in the ANSI C++ committe consider allowing these traditional
K&R expressions back into the ANSI C++ language?

Do I have to write a _proposal_ for this?

Does anybody know what was the rationale for making these expressions illegal
in ANSI-C ?

Ramon Pantin