I almost mentioned the fact that pointers were pretty much always aligned on the 68k, but I never really head of anyone using those bits to store anything. The top-8 had the "nice" property that the hardware did the masking for you.
I do remember that certain parts of the Amiga OS (particularly in the file system, I believe) used "BPTRs" which were essentially pointers shifted down 2 bits -- in other words, the word index instead of the individual byte index. Normal pointers were called "APTRs" by the code that used BPTRs.
Yes, the APTR / BPTR divergence had something to do with AmigaDOS (the disk operating subsystem) was originally written with BCPL. While it was later rewritten in C, however, the ABI had to remain compatible and thus the pointer-mangling continued. I don't remember if they had any use for the extra two bits or whether the addressing scheme was coined particularly just to access a 4x large address space.
I almost mentioned the fact that pointers were pretty much always aligned on the 68k, but I never really head of anyone using those bits to store anything. The top-8 had the "nice" property that the hardware did the masking for you.
I do remember that certain parts of the Amiga OS (particularly in the file system, I believe) used "BPTRs" which were essentially pointers shifted down 2 bits -- in other words, the word index instead of the individual byte index. Normal pointers were called "APTRs" by the code that used BPTRs.