[Python-Dev] Removing tp_compare? (original) (raw)

Niklas Norrthon niklas.norrthon at esri-sgroup.se
Mon Feb 2 08:52:28 CET 2009

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 21:33, "Mark Dickinson" <dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 6:03 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

> [...] sizeof(void*) may be > different from sizeof(cmpfunc*) on some platforms. Do you know of a platform where this is actually the case?

I don't, so if no-one else does either then there's probably little point worrying about it. The best reference I could find (besides the C standards themselves, and in particular section 6.3.2.3 of the C99 standard) was an ancient and short discussion on comp.std.c (starting June 21, 1998, subject "Q: void pointers and function pointers") where some of the posters claimed to have encountered such platforms.

I do know of at least one such platform. Sure it's a bit dated, and probably not relevant for the python development, but definitely not exotic or rare!

Don't you rememeber the PC:s in the late 1980th? It was based on Intel's 80286-processor, and Microsoft's C compiler supported three or four different memory models, called things like "TINY", "SMALL", "LARGE", and "HUGE". Most of these memory models had different sized data and function pointers.

Niklas Norrthon

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