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From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uses of "short" ?
Message-ID: <94@l5.uucp>
Date: Tue, 10-Sep-85 03:57:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5.94
Posted: Tue Sep 10 03:57:07 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Sep-85 21:15:29 EDT
References: <486@houxh.UUCP>
Reply-To: laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Organization: Ell-Five [Consultants], San Francisco
Lines: 19


Remember that any code that you write is likely to be ported to machines
you never dreamed of. [There are gremlins who wait until the crack of
7 a.m. when all hackers are blissfully asleep to scrounge copies of your
source and distribute it to 50 random net sites all over the world.] If
your int is the same size as your short it may make no difference to you
whether you use int or short, but it may matter to someone else a great
deal. [The worse problem is people who think that sizeof(int) == sizeof(long)
mostly because that is the way it works on their vax. Move their code to a
pdp 11 and watch it dump core when things just aren't big enough.]

There are days when I think that the declaration ``int'' should be banned
to see if the code quality would improve.


-- 
Laura Creighton		(note new address!)
sun!l5!laura		(that is ell-five, not fifteen)
l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa