From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Tue,  5 Jul 2005 08:47:07 -0600
From: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To: David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com>,
	Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] 8c question
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507050846070.30613@enigma.lanl.gov>
References: <Pine.BSI.4.61.0507011316130.8592@malasada.lava.net>
	<09405af8d5c18c32321c0de7b2fd90d3@terzarima.net>
	<3e1162e6050704193649539ee@mail.gmail.com>
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On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, David Leimbach wrote:

> On 7/2/05, Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net> wrote:
> > >>it cant be worked around without breaking the cross
> > >>platform features of their headers.
> > 
> > sounds brilliantly portable to me.
> > what do they do?  insert 0-length padding areas
> > to make these structures `portable'?
> > 
> > 
> Yeah, it's undefined what happens if a struct is empty in C99. Seems a
> really silly thing for someone to rely on.  What are they trying to
> accomplish?  The only thing I can think of is some kind of type safety
> based on a tag generated for a unique "struct".  They should probably
> make it wrap a void * or something.
> 


IIRC this is one of those deals where people do something liiek:

struct element {
	int x,y;
};

struct a {
	int numelements;
	struct elements blah[0];
};

is that it Tim? I might be wrong on this. 

It's not reliable in gcc, as we found out the hard way on the linuxbios 
project ...

ron