Re: [PATCH] Beginnings of conpat 32 code cleanups

[Cort Dougan <cort@fsmlabs.com>]

"IMHO"?  Larry, you're never humble about your opinions :)

} IMHO, the thing that the early Unix systems did wrong was to not have 
} u8, u16, u32, etc as basic ctypes in sys/types.h.  And C should have 
} had a way to fake it if they weren't native.
} 
} Anyone who has ported a networking stack or worked on driver knows exactly
} what I'm talking about.
} 
} And while I'm whining, 
} 
} 	assert(strlen(any typedef) < 8));

Plan9 takes it a step further and tackles the char/8-byte issue.  A
printable character is a 16-byte entity - a rune - while char is an 8-byte
quantity.  Doing everything in UNICODE forced the issue, I think.

Even better, everything was designed to run with different byte-ordering
schemes so:

ulong
getlong(void)
{
	ulong l;

	l = (getchar()&0xFF)<<24;
	|= (getchar()&0xFF)<<16;
	l |= (getchar()&0xFF)<<8;
	l |= (getchar()&0xFF)<<0;
	return l;
}

always works correctly.  They even ripped out the darn c-preprocessor and
just made a smarter optimization compiler.

Improvements in C without ending up with something like C# or C++.  Can't
beat that with a stick.

Ah, yes... the streets are paved with gold in the land of Plan9.

} I like my stack variable declarations to line up.  I despise some_long_name_t
} typedefs with a passion.

There is a special kind of mind that allows people to follow 5 levels worth
of typedef to struct including stuct with typedefs in them.  It involves
having a very unhealthy outlook on the world.