Ah right, I totally misread segmentation as fragmentation, sorry. IMHO a more flexible segmentation system (exposed as base-pointer plus offset) wouldn't actua

Ah right, I totally misread segmentation as fragmentation, sorry. IMHO a more flexible segmentation system (exposed as base-pointer plus offset) wouldn't actually be bad if properly supported by high level languages. You could treat the base pointer as 'private knowledge' inside a system and only hand out the offset as a 'public handle'. To access a specific address you need both the private base pointer and public offset handle, and the base pointer could also move around without invalidating the offset handles in the wild. Of course all this can be done purely in software too already.