[TUHS] why is sum reporting different checksum's between v6 and v7

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Random832

    > Interestingly, the SysIII sum.c program, which I assume yields the same
    > result for this input, appears to go through the whole input
    > accumulating the sum of all the bytes into a long, then adds the two
    > halves of the long at the end rather than after every byte.

That's the same hack a lot of TCP/IP checksums routines used on machines with
longer words; add the words, then fold the result in the shorter length at the
end. The one I wrote for the 68K back in '84 did that.

    > This suggests that the two programs would give different results for
    > very large files that overflow a 32-bit value.

No, I don't think so, depending on the exact detals of the implementation. As
long as when folding the two halves together, you add any carry into the sum,
you get the same result as doing it into a 16-bit sum. (If my memory of how
this all works is correct - the neurons aren't what they used to be,
especially late in the day... :-)

    > Also, if this sign extends, then its behavior on "negative" (high bit
    > set) bytes is likely to be very different from the SysIII one, which
    > uses getc.

I have this bit set that in C, 'char' is defined to be signed, and
furthermore that when you assign a shorter int to a longer one, the sign is
extended. So if one has a char holding '0200' octal (i.e. -128), assigning it
to a 16-bit int should result in the latter holding '0177600' (i.e. still
-128). So in fact I think they probably act the same.

	Noel