Vittorio Caffa wrote:
> Well, if the standard does not say anything, I do not see way a
> compiler should implement TRANSFER() copying memory. By the
> way I think
> the word transfer is not appropriate, translate or convert whould have
> been better.
Given that TRANSFER is, syntactically, a function, you can think of it as
returning a copy of the argument data having the desired target type. A
compiler could choose to optimize this as a "cast" and not do a copy, and I
imagine most do. The standard is, in general, silent about how a
"processor" should implement a particular semantic requirement, and I think
that's a good thing.
Neither "translate" nor "convert" would be appropriate terms - both imply a
modification of the bits. "shoveitintoaboxthatlookslikethis" would have
been a bit wordy...
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