Date:        Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:51:24 -0500 (EST)
    From:        der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
    Message-ID:  <200702131559.KAA11449@Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>

  | I have no intention of making it *necessary*.  I'd like to make it
  | *possible*.  (Currently it's not, without depending on nonportabilities
  | like pointers past the ends of objects.)  If someone else prefers to
  | align the buffer and use the 2292-defined macros, fine, go to.

As I said, I have no problem with adding a couple of extra macros (all
they would harm is to cause a trivial compilation slowdown to code
including the relevant header file, and some almost certainly harmless
namespace pollution), but I'm not sure that they would do you much good.

After all, your aim is to write portable application code, and these days,
that means more portable to different OS's than portable to different
architectures (though both are important).

If the extra macros were added to NetBSD, you still wouldn't be able to
use them in your portable code, or it wouldn't work on Solaris, MacOS,
Linux, ...

The only solution to this kind of thing is to get the standard interface
improved so that it avoids the problems - whether your proposed method
is the best way to do that or not I'm not sure (it's more a way that
works for you with minimal changes, which is not necessarily the
best final solution).

kre