Re: [TUHS] origins of void* -- Apology!

I don't think either Dennis or I ever thought that characters should be signed.  It's true that PCC didn't specify it.  It's also true that in those days the 8th bit in a char was pretty much unused (except by the shell), so the issue never arose.  I believe the folks at Bell Labs Holmdel who did the port to the Vax were the first ones to come up with signed characters.  I think it was a real blot on C.  For example, consider:        struct {  ....               char x:1;        ...        } If characters are signed, the only legal values of x are 0 and -1 (!) Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Warner Losh" <imp(a)bsdimp.com> To: "Nemo" <cym224(a)gmail.com> Cc: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> Sent: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 09:12:50 -0700 Subject: Re: [TUHS] origins of void* -- Apology! On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com [1]> wrote: On 6 November 2017 at 19:36, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com [2]> wrote: nor unsigned. the inane What was that story about porting an early UNIX to a machine with different char polarity?  I dimly recall only a few problems. Doesn't even have to be very early... There's lots of 'assume char is signed bugs' in even modern code. So many that ARM gave up on the idea that unsigned char was good (since the underlying ARM architecture supported it better) and their modern ABIs are all signed char. The other thing that EABI fixes is the crazy alignment rules that were out-of-step with the rest of the computer industry that broke a lot of networking and storage code on ARM because its rules caused structs that would otherwise describe the binary layout to be suddenly wrong. Yes, that is an implementation choice, just a poor one that was eventually corrected. When I was working on FreeBSD/arm only a decade ago, I'd routinely hit both of these issues... Warner Links: ------ [1] mailto:cym224@gmail.com [2] mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com