strong/weak typing and pointers

[Greg Ewing]

Diez B. Roggisch wrote:
> I can remeber abusing 32bit pointers in 68k processors by
> altering the most-significant byte.

Apple did this in early versions of the Memory Manager
of classic MacOS, using the upper 8 bits of a Handle
for various flags. You weren't supposed to make any
assumptions about what the upper byte contained, but
of course some people did... and their applications
broke when 32-bit addressing came in...

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg