On 14/09/17 11:30, Eric Botcazou wrote: >> I seem to remember it being able to attach a big-endian or little-endian >> label to any individual variable (rather than a type), which could be a >> scaler rather than a struct. So it was a bit more flexible than gcc. > > Well, the only thing I see in the documentation for "Byte Ordering" is the > reference to pragma Pack and the __packed__ keyword for structures, which can > toggle byte ordering by means of the byte-swap argument: > > "#pragma pack > [ ([[max_member_alignment] , [min_structure_alignment][, byte-swap ]] ) ] > > The pack directive specifies that all subsequent structures..." > > with the same limitation as GCC about taking the address: > > "It is not possible to take the address of a byte-swapped member." >
It is, as I say, a /long/ time since I looked at it. I could easily be remembering incorrectly - and it could also be a difference in the versions. Being unable to take the address of a byte-swapped member is a reasonable and understandable limitation when byte-swapping is expressed this way. It would be one of the advantages in using a named address space - then you /could/ take a pointer, but it would be a pointer qualified by the address space name, and incompatible with normal pointers.
