Re: struct interface

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

Michael Livshin <cmm@verisity.com> writes:

> Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se> writes:
> 
> > What is pathologic?  To mix SCM values with other types in a struct?
> > I don't think so.
> 
> nor me.  but to not word-align SCM's is pathologic (at least in
> objects that sit in memory and that you work with).

I don't want to introduce complexity in the user interface.  One
should be able to write things like:

struct foo {
  char c;
  SCM s;
}

and rely on that this will work whatever architecture you're running
on.

If we require users to do explicit padding, I think this will become a
common source of bugs.

Also, I don't see any big reason why we couldn't support non-aligned
SCM words.  As I said earlier, we can use a separate set of macros for
this type of access.