[Cryptography] GCC bug 30475 (was Re: bounded pointers in C)

[Jerry Leichter]

On May 1, 2014, at 11:50 AM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamilton at acm.org> wrote:
> It is interesting that we do not have the same complaint for Java and the .NET languages that use the same type names as the C Language, with similar limitations on arithmetic over those types....
I can't speak to .NET, but the Java Standard specifically says:  "The integral types are byte, short, int, and long, whose values are 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit signed two's-complement integers, respectively....".  Good luck producing an efficient - or even reasonable - implementation of Java on a machine which uses 1's complement or sign-and-value as its native representation.  These do still exist, and can be important, especially in embedded applications and some "supercomputer" applications.

As I mentioned before, Java originally specified FP arithmetic this tightly - and as a result compliant, reasonably efficient implementations were *impossible* on tons of hardware.  The Java community eventually backed off because this was an issue for so much of what they decided was the Java audience; but when it comes to other forms of integer arithmetic, they've effectively written off multiple classes of machines.

                                                        -- Jerry

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