4 ms·
I found it interesting that Pascal had a "packed" keyword and C didn't (outside of implementation specific attributes like __attribute__ ((aligned (8))) in GNU)
by waynecochran 4y ago
I found it interesting that Pascal had a "packed" keyword and C didn't (outside of implementation specific attributes like __attribute__ ((aligned (8))) in GNU).
- layer8 4y agoThe reason is that Pascal was used on computers with long machine words (e.g. 36 bits) where memory wasn’t byte addressable. It was customary (in assembly code) to “pack” multiple logical fields into a single word, in particular multiple characters of a text string. The “packed” feature in Pascal was added for that purpose.