On 27.10.2010, at 11:49, Henning Thielemann wrote:

Axel Simon wrote:

...

I do not see the problem that anybody is every going to accidentally evaluate sizeOf or alginment and get an unexpected "undefined" value back. I don't see the compiler optimization problem - it may exists but if the argument of Storage is fixed (and it always is in any use of Storage) then the compiler should be able to inline the 4 or 8 or whatever alignment evaluates to.

I like to repeat my example here: sizeOf (a,b) = sizeOf a + sizeOf b

The point was that I assume that the usual use case is to marshal C structs where you would only use sizeOf in very specific patterns that do not include your example (or would you ever allocate memory to serialize two C structs, one after the other?). Axel