Path: utzoo!attcan!ncrcan!scocan!john From: john@sco.COM (John R. MacMillan) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Style guides and portability Message-ID: <1991Jan17.185044.5382@sco.COM> Date: 17 Jan 91 18:50:44 GMT References: <1163@tredysvr.Tredydev.Unisys.COM> <14824@smoke.brl.mil> <116@thor.UUCP> Sender: news@sco.COM (News administration) Distribution: comp Organization: SCO Canada, Inc. Lines: 25 |At the risk of putting my foot in something unpleasant, I would like |to say I believe INT32 & friends *are* of real value. Sure, right now |"long int" is 32 bits on any machine which supports it. I firmly |believe that in the relatively near future 64-bit & above machines |will become a common reality. I don't know what C, etc. will do to |support 64-bit integers, but I *do* know that whatever it is, I will |be able to port my code with at most a simple change of the type of |INT32. It helps me sleep at night ... :-) If the new machine has a 32 bit integer type, perhaps. I ported a large amount of software to a 64-bit machine, and one application which broke most often used int16, int32, et al, so the argument that simply using these constructs will allow upward portability is not true. Much of the confusion in this piece of software stemmed from the fact that in some places int16 was thought of as being *at least* 16 bits and in others it was *exactly* 16 bits. The porting guide stated the former, but obviously not all the developers adhered to it. The machine had no 16 bit integer type. -- John R. MacMillan | I guess I lied to you when I told you I like baseball SCO Canada, Inc. | It's not so much the game I like it's the hats. john@sco.COM | -- barenaked ladies