This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 115d. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-10-26


1701. Array vs sequence in object representation

Section: 6.8  [basic.types]     Status: drafting     Submitter: Lawrence Crowl     Date: 2013-06-14

According to 6.8 [basic.types] paragraph 4,

The object representation of an object of type T is the sequence of N unsigned char objects taken up by the object of type T, where N equals sizeof(T).

However, it is not clear that a “sequence” can be indexed, as an array can and as is required for the implementation of memcpy and similar code.

Additional note, November, 2014:

An additional point of concern has been raised as to whether it is appropriate to refer to the constituent bytes of an object as being “objects” themselves, along with the interaction of this specification with copying or not copying parts of the object representation that do not participate in the value representation of the object (“padding” bytes).