Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Fix char signedness

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Saturday 28 October 2006 6:46 am, Martin Guy wrote:
> > gcc on ARM systems default to unsigned.  The C standard specifically
> > states that char is either signed or unsigned at the whim of the
> > implementor
> 
> Or, more to the point, at the behest of the machine architecture.
> Having to generate code to sign-extend the hard way every time you do
> char-integer promotion if the hardware doesn't do it automatically
> would be long and inefficient, specially since it happens all the
> time.

I'd rather have inefficient than broken.  And in general, using "char" as a 
small "int" is going to _suck_ on arm.  The extra code size more than makes 
up for the data size you save if you only have one or two instances of your 
data at a time.

Rob
-- 
"Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but
when there is no longer anything to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery