🚀 go-pugleaf

Thad Smith (thads@csn.net) wrote:
: In article <1995Sep13.212437.6823@sq.com>, msb@sq.com (Mark Brader) wrote:
: >To paraphrase Isaac
: >Asimov said, if you break a piece of chalk in half, you don't get two
: >partial piece of chalk; you get two pieces.  An object is a region of
: >storage, so it works the same way.

: Chalk is uniform, so each piece serve the purpose of the whole.  This
: isn't true of half a double.  Every occurrance of "object" that I have
: seen in the standard refers to an object with some corresponding type.
: This doesn't fit with the half double, unless you want to say that the
: object is an array of a char type.  While we can call the copied
: portion an object which is an array of chars, it makes more sense to
: me when copying part of a double to say that a partial object was
: copied.

But it does make sense to copy a double that is a field (a part) of a 
structure. C objects can be broken down meaningfully to smaller objects 
allong certain lines. However it must be sort of valid to break along
character lines - as  memcpy  does when copying. The characters must be
valid so that they can be copied, even if on their own they are not
meaningful.

--
Stephen Baynes                              baynes@mulsoc2.serigate.philips.nl
Philips Semiconductors Ltd
Southampton                                 My views are my own.
United Kingdom