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From: aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Orphaned Response
Message-ID: <26600033@ccvaxa>
Date: Mon, 30-Jun-86 22:00:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ccvaxa.26600033
Posted: Mon Jun 30 22:00:00 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Jul-86 01:28:16 EDT
References: <8606161842.AA20107@pavepaws>
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Nf-ID: #R:<8606161842.AA20107@pavepaws>:-29:ccvaxa:26600033:000:996
Nf-From: ccvaxa.UUCP!aglew    Jun 30 21:00:00 1986


I've noticed a lot of people talking about shorts and ints and longs,
and whether an int should be 16 or 32 bits, and what the size of a 
short should be.

I've also noticed somebody say that he always uses shorts or longs,
because they always have a definite size. SHAME! Where is it written
in stone that shorts are 16 bits and longs are 32 bits, and ints one
or the other? What if you have a machine that supports 64 bit integers
in hardware - wouldn't it be natural to have shorts 16 bits, ints 32 bits,
and longs 64 bits? Sure it would be! - but you can't do the sensible
thing because of all sorts of brain-damaged non-portable programs that
assume an int is the same thing as a long, 32 bits worth. Which leads
to abominations like long longs, etc.

This is what is going to kill C - not Ada, just the accumulation of
implicit machine dependencies.

Andy "Krazy" Glew. Gould CSD-Urbana.    USEnet:  ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!aglew
1101 E. University, Urbana, IL 61801    ARPAnet: aglew@gswd-vms