On 17 October 2013 03:38, Peter Sommerlad <peter.sommerlad@hsr.ch> wrote:

Hi, just to throw in my 0.02 CHF:

On 17.10.2013, at 07:27, Nevin Liber <nevin@eviloverlord.com> wrote:

Well, I dream the future with non-uniform memory architectures might make that argument wrong again. We might have "pointers" that differ substantially, depending if the memory address resides in RAM "directly" attached to a CPU or on a different CPU or on a GPU. And comparing such pointers wildly might not be the thing you should be allowed to do.

Just remember, technology development often goes in circles, e.g., we get electric cars again after 100+ years, we are reinventing parallel programming (a lot of work from the 70s/80s gets rediscovered), etc.

I understand the fear argument, because (so far) that is the only argument being made for not changing the standard to match existing practice.

But, even if segmented architectures, unlikely though it is, do come back, the ordering problem still has to be addressed, as std::less<T*> is required to totally order pointers. I just want operator< to be an alternate spelling for that property.

Why should everyone else pretend to suffer (and I do mean pretend, because outside of a small contingent of the committee, people already assume that pointers are totally ordered with respect to operator<) to meet the theoretical needs of some currently non-existent architecture?
--

Nevin ":-)" Liber <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com> (847) 691-1404