Re: Proposal: immediate strings

[Dmitry Antipov]

On 05/31/2012 08:34 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Part of my misunderstanding was due to that the code confuses 'unsigned long'
> with 'ptrdiff_t'.  The two types need not be the same width.
> The code should use 'sizeof (ptrdiff_t)' where it currently
> uses 'sizeof (unsigned long)', and we need a BITS_PER_PTRDIFF_T
> enum to size the fields correctly.

The problem with ptrdiff_t is that it's signed (and has no unsigned version),
and the code assumes that the bitfields are unsigned.

This raises the question which I wanted to raise long time ago: why ptrdiff_t
(read: signed difference between pointers) is used for size values, although
there is a special type ssize_t (and it's unsigned counterpart size_t)?

Dmitry