----Original Message---- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of me22 Sent: 09 June 2006 14:51 To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] [endian] Refresh based on comments received

On 6/9/06, Martin Bonner <martin.bonner@pitechnology.com> wrote:

...

No. They all have AT LEAST 8 bits, but there are certainly C implementations with 9-bit char and 32-bit char. I don't know if any of these have C++ compilers (but the standard certainly permits it). (You might of course decide to explicitly limit your library to 8-bit char platforms only.)

How do those C implementations handle I/O? Does fgetc actually give the next 9 or 32 bits of the file?

Well, some of them (DSPs) are freestanding implementations and don't /have/ fgetc. But in general, yes. Of course, on such systems the file will be divided into 9 or 32 bit sized chunks. (Which makes file transfer interesting).

If, for example, the sockets implementation actually filled all 9 bits in a byte on a recv, I could see that being a portability nightmare...

The sockets implementation receive octets down the wire (and they are called octets not bytes because the designers were aware of non-8-bit bytes). recv will store each octet into a byte (which C and C++ guarantees is big enough). send might just transmit the low eight bits of each byte as the octet, or it might fail if higher bits are non-zero. -- Martin Bonner Martin.Bonner@Pitechnology.com Pi Technology, Milton Hall, Ely Road, Milton, Cambridge, CB4 6WZ, ENGLAND Tel: +44 (0)1223 203894