Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ll-xn!adelie!mirror!xanth!kyle
From: kyle@xanth.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: standardizing integral type sizes
Message-ID: <791@xanth.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Apr-87 02:48:13 EST
Article-I.D.: xanth.791
Posted: Tue Apr  7 02:48:13 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Apr-87 03:01:59 EST
Organization: odu computer science, norfolk, va
Lines: 21

I would like to see the sizes of C integral types standardized.  It would be
much easier to write portable code if when I define a variable as an 'int' I
could automatically know that its range is -128 to 127, or -32768 to 32768,
etc.

One proposal might be:

	char	 8 bits
	short	16 bits
	int	32 bits
	long	64 bits

Having compilers on 16-bit machines generate code to handle 64-bit long's may
be cumbersome, but just knowing how "large" each type is would (probably) make
programmers more conscientious about which types they use.  Thus those "huge"
long's won't be needlessly used as often.

Besides savaging quite a few C implementations, what are the other drawbacks
to this?  Has this already been proposed?

kyle@xanth.cs.odu.edu    (kyle jones @ old dominion university, norfolk, va)