8 Jun
2017
8 Jun
'17
3:55 p.m.
On 6/8/2017 9:49 AM, Random832 wrote:
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017, at 15:15, Arthur Krewat wrote:
Shortly after making that statement, it occurred to me that the
preprocessor or assembler could take care of that easily.
Even better than worrying about whether arrays started at 0 or 1 in C
would be to institute bounds checking in the first place :) But again
would add lots of extra code that in the days of the origins of C was
not something you wanted to add to the memory footprint.
In the days when memory and clock cycles were
costly, an extra decrement
or subtract was not something to be taken lightly :)
You wouldn't need a
decrement per access, because the base itself could
still be stored as the address of the "0th" element (i.e. what would be
the "-1th" in a 0-based system). It might add some extra complexity to
the relocator, if it's not currently possible to have a reference
outside the bounds of an object and/or with a negative offset, but
statically linked programs (the only kind on V7 and earlier) did not do
any runtime relocation.