OT: This Swift thing

[Gregory Ewing]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 	Not "standard" Pascal... It had pointer types, but no means to "stuff"
> an integer into the pointer variable in order to dereference it as a memory
> address...

Although most implementations would let you get the same
effect by abusing variant records (the equivalent of a
C union).

> What is an interrupt --
> typically a handler (function) address stored in a fixed location used by
> the CPU when an external hardware signal goes high... Nothing prevents one
> from writing that handler in C and using C's various casting operations to
> stuff it into the vector memory.

Most CPU architectures require you to use a special
"return from interrupt" instruction to return from
a hardware interrupt handler. So you need at least
a small assembly language stub to call a handler
written in C, or a C compiler with a non-standard
extension to generate that instruction.

-- 
Greg