bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
Frits van Bommel:
[1]: Hey, x86 technically has 6-byte pointers if you count segments as
part of the pointer (which would be mostly useless on currently popular
operating systems though).
It does, but I know of no compiler that supports that (C, C++, or any
other), and code that needs to deal with that tends to be assembler.
16 free bits suggest various possible usages, for example the length for small
strings/arrays, halving the size of the array struct.
It's not that there are 16 extra bits available, it's that technically
to specify a memory location you need to specify 16 more bits in one of
a couple special registers. In practice though, these are pretty much
always the same (or equivalent, at least).
