FFI Report, CVS Id 1.11

[Carl R. Witty]

"Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> writes:

> Array and list indicies are quite different beats from
> pointer differences.  To get into a problem with array
> indicies, we would need an array (and thus, heap) that is
> big enough to requires such an index.  In contrast, pointers
> are not constrained be point into the heap.  For, example
> with mmap(), I can easily get two pointers that are much
> further apart than what would fit into the real (even the
> virtual) memory of the concrete hardware.  In other words,
> in x86 Linux, your address space is already 3GB.  We don't
> need any new fancy hardware for 30 bit pointer differences
> to have the potential to get us into trouble.

Why would you want to take the difference of two pointers that point
into different objects?

Carl Witty