Re: [Chicken-users] long pointer equivalent

[Perry E. Metzger]

felix <address@hidden> writes:
> > In this case, I prolly actually need u64vector, s64vector.
> > 
> > The trouble is I'm trying to figure out how to easily make an array in
> > chicken of the right type and pass it to these functions that expect it.
> > In short, I'm still a little confused, I'm sure time and beating on the
> > problem will show the solution.
> 
> You shouldn't worry about 64-bit platforms, yet. That way you can use
> `s32vector'/`u32vector' as foreign argument types and everything works.

One question. In many OSes these days, even on 32 bit platforms, there
are a lot of 64 bit types. For example, the NetBSD lseek call is:

off_t lseek(int fildes, off_t offset, int whence);

where an off_t is (at least) a signed 64 bit integer type. Many
important system calls use 64 bit types because things like files on
disks, or disks themselves, or numbers of packets that a counter might
have to deal with, etc., exceed the width of a 32 bit integer.

NetBSD is hardly the only system around like this -- most Unixes are
like this nowadays.

I know you don't want to deal with more than one size of fixnum, but
dealing with 64 bit types is rather important for people doing systems
programming type tasks.

Perry