Could we get a LP64 version identifier?

[Frits van Bommel]

bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>> Frits van Bommel:
>>> [1]: Hey, x86 technically has 6-byte pointers if you count segments as 
>>> part of the pointer (which would be mostly useless on currently popular 
>>> operating systems though).
>> It does, but I know of no compiler that supports that (C, C++, or any 
>> other), and code that needs to deal with that tends to be assembler.
> 
> 16 free bits suggest various possible usages, for example the length for small strings/arrays, halving the size of the array struct.

It's not that there are 16 extra bits available, it's that technically 
to specify a memory location you need to specify 16 more bits in one of 
a couple special registers. In practice though, these are pretty much 
always the same (or equivalent, at least).