On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 16:13 -0700, steve wrote: > Uh... what about boolean? Depending on the compiler and instruction > set differences, even one-byte things now have to be on longword > boundaries, meaning that something that is one byte will have to take > 8 in order to be on proper boundaries. Unless the app or compiler is > doing packing, which I don't think is the case with PHP. When memory > was more expensive, we designed CPUs to be able to do instructions on > off-boundary positions in memory. Well, not so much with RISC, and not > so much with modern instruction sets. It's just so much faster. A word boundary usually matches the natural integer size for the processor. In the case of a 32 bit processor it would be 32 bits, in the case of a 64 bit processor it would be 64 bits. This may or may not hold for windows, but more than likely the word size doubles between the 32 bit architecture and the 64 bit architecture. As such due to alignment we would still see only a maximal doubling of space. Fringe cases may exist to satisfy your argument, but I doubt PHP falls into this category... especially as relates to a packaged binary or default configure. Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
