On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 9:59 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr <g...@shiresoft.com> wrote: >> On May 21, 2016, at 4:33 AM, Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> wrote: >>> First off, the C standard mandates that the order of fields in a >>> struct cannot be reordered, >> Yes. (I think this is a Bad Thing, but I can see why they did it.) > Given that C is a systems implementation language, how would you > define HW related data structures where the order of the fields is > critical (ie HW defines them). [...] > My biggest complaint about the C standard is that the order that bits > within a bit field are compiler defined. This basically means that they > are completely unusable for anything that requires interoperability.
Agreed. It was a solved problem in Ada back in 1983, so I don't know why the C committees couldn't have solved it in ANSI C in 1989, or ISO C in 1990, 1995, 1999, or 2011. Maybe the C committee is no longer concerned with use of C for low-level systems programming? (Though IMNSHO that's the only thing that it's even vaguely reasonable for.) Admittedly representation specifications are an *optional* part of Ada, but any Ada compiler intended for systems programming use would support them.
