> There is absolutely no reason to associate the bit size of an integer
> with address space.

Well, there are several pragmatic ones, actually. :-)  They do tend to
go together; indeed, if anyone knows of a machine where an int has more
bits than a pointer, I would be fascinated to hear more about it.

> There are a fair number of systems [...] on which int and long are
> different sizes, and pointers are as big as long...  It's called
> MS-DOS in <foo> mode.  (I can't recall what <foo> is...)

Any in which the default pointer type is far.  Large and huge, I think
they're usually called.  (If any DOS compiler has a mode where pointers
are huge by default, that would probably qualify too, but I don't know
of any.  I've often thought it would be the only sane way to do C under
DOS, because it preserves the flat-address-space model.)

Of course, even far/huge pointers don't _have_ to be that big; there's
no reason they couldn't be as small as two and a half bytes (though
admittedly three bytes is probably more practical; if nothing else,
conformance with a data type occupying a non-integral number of chars
is somewhere between difficult and impossible).  By my understanding,
anything over 20 bits is perforce wasted, in an information-theoretic
sense.

Unless you want to put EMS/XMS/whatever into the language pointer-fetch
code...in which case, heck, you could do pointers over 32 bits on a
SPARC by paging from disk "by hand", if you're willing to go that far.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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