On Sat, 2 Apr 2016 18:58:10 -0400 (EDT) Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
> He's assuming the "the entire address space is a single > array of bytes (perhaps with holes)" memory model is the only possible > one. He needs to talk with someone who wrote large-model 8086 code - > or someone who's used the Lisp Machine C compiler I heard of that > represents pointers as <array,index> pairs Indeed, intel segmented memory model was weird. Near pointers were uncomparable between the segments, but it wasn't that unintuitive. Far pointers were insanity-inducing, though. Since there were multiple ways to represent the same address as a far pointer, there was completely no point in doing any comparisons (unless you normalized them, of course). Thankfully, huge pointers behaved exactly as one would expect, i.e. just like pointers work in the protected mode.