would using casts fix the problem?

would using casts fix the problem?

Posted Apr 16, 2008 21:29 UTC (Wed) by MathFox (guest, #6104)
In reply to: would using casts fix the problem? by jengelh
Parent article: GCC and pointer overflows

I guess that you missed the point completely. aend-a (no casts needed) should give 10 on any platform. The bit pattern in a pointer is implementation defined and that particular platform had (64-bits IIRC) word-based addresses in a 48 bit address space. The low 48 bits of a character pointer were the address of the word containing the character; the high bits addressed the byte in the word.

Standard conforming programs don't rely on pointer layout.

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to post comments

yes,
  aend - a
(without cast) _is_ 10 in any platform, but
  (int)aend - (int)a
is _undefined_ behaviour, because the bit pattern when converting from 
pointer to int is implementation-defined.