site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On Jun 15, 2006, at 6:12 AM, Andrew Gallatin wrote: I honestly wasn't trying to bait you, but since you seem to be baiting me... with accessor/mutator functions to insulate the underlying implementation from necessary data structure changes. This is actually a fundamental Computer Science concept for object oriented programming. There's a good Wikipedia article on it at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessor> Is it found right between "slow" and "inefficent" ? :) Solaris has a much, much more stable driver ABI than you guys do (drivers compiled before MacOSX even existed still work) and it allows direct access to structures (like uio). Sure, and if you want to assume that changes in hardware architecture and the way software uses that hardware stopped fifteen years ago then that model works fine. = Mike _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... On Jun 15, 2006, at 1:49 PM, Andrew Gallatin wrote: Terry Lambert writes: More than a theory; I've personally made kernel changes in this area for 64 bit support in the Tiger release that would break code that was using promiscuous knowledge of the structure contents, instead of using an accessor/mutator. The idea is to replace data interfaces This would not be required if you had a 64-bit kernel. Of course, if there was a 64-bit kernel, it wouldn't run on 32-bit hardware, and it would require a complete re-write of every device driver in existence. It's fair to say that the folks making these decisions aren't *complete* idiots. Look in the second section, or seqrch in the page for "accessor". This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com