/Wp64 and casting pointers to DWORDs

Most of my coding has been on 32 bit Windows and there has been this subconscious assumption I’ve always made that I could safely cast any pointer to a DWORD. I gotta change that now I guess though it’s tough to stop assuming my subconscious assumptions cause they are – well, subconscious assumptions (bad joke – yeah I know, I know, but I am in that sorta mood).

Luckily, if you turn on the /Wp64 compiler option, you’ll get a C4311 compiler warning if you attempt to do that. If you only intend to run your 32-bit programs in a 64-bit OS that supports 32-bit compatibility mode this is okay I guess, but if you want to take your code and recompile it using a 64-bit compiler in the near future, then it’d be best to turn on this /Wp64 option for all your current projects.

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The glorious times of yore; or were they?

I hope I am not an exception, but when I look back at the various phases in my life, I’ve always felt that the previous phases were so wonderful and serene and how my life had deteriorated in various ways over the years. When I finished school and began my engineering course, I used to wistfully think of my school days and how life was so relaxed and uncomplicated back then compared to the scarily complicated incidents in my college life. Later when I got my first job and faced the difficulties associated with living on my own money, I looked back to my college days and wished that they weren’t already behind me.

It’s not just my social life or my finances that seem to have been so magnificent ages ago. When I sit in front of my laptop and play with VC++ 2005, I think back to my GWBASIC and MASM days of the early 90s. I’d probably have had reminiscences about punch cards too, except I wasn’t born when they used to punch holes into punch cards and call it programming. Good thing too, else I’d probably have got punched regularly for punching holes into someone else’s punch cards, given my absent minded nature and that all punch cards look pretty much alike.

Now I am 27 and am slowly approaching the staircase into middle age and I look back at my first job and have this idea thrust upon me by my illogical mind that life was so much more relaxed and safer then. I decided that enough was enough and that this past-glorification had to stop. So, I sat down and thought about this and weighed the pros and cons carefully and then weighed them once again just to be doubly sure. Guess what? Now that I have pondered over this phenomena of illogically glorifying the past, I realize that it’s just an irrational feeling – nothing more, nothing less. I better note down all the bad stuff that’s going on in my life right now, so that ten years henceforth, if I ever have this feeling that my life was so much more wonderful ten years ago (which’d be now), I can have the momentous satisfaction of taking these notes out and reading them aloud and after reading them aloud, I can tell the past-glorification portions of my brain to shut up and be damned!

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