Re: Bit-Pattern of Representation of Objects

* Kai-Uwe Bux:


ASIPW (Academic Spanner In Practical Wheel): how well does your code
work with diamond pattern virtual inheritance? <g>

Actually it's potentially far worse than that, from an academic or
language lawyer point of view, depending on which committee member
faction one favors.

IIRC, David Abrahams argued that for /any/ non-POD class the compiler is
allowed to distribute an object's value representation hither and dither
in memory, with just some pointers or offsets here and there to connect
things (essentially that's what done for the case mentioned above, but
you don't expect it elsewhere in practice), and further that this was
inherent in the phrase "region of storage" (or memory, whatever it was,
look up the definition of "object" in the standard), which, as he saw
it, was not necessarily a contigous region but rather any set of bytes.
  I.e., that even a /variable/, a named object, is not necessarily
contained in the set of bytes from its start address through sizeof
bytes. My own view is, perhaps needless to say, that it is.

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?