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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: standardizing integral type sizes
Message-ID: <17001@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 20-Apr-87 13:14:15 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.17001
Posted: Mon Apr 20 13:14:15 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 21-Apr-87 02:42:18 EST
References: <101@umich.UUCP> <791@xanth.UUCP> <1987Apr9.155110.28398@sq.uucp> <652@edge.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 19

>I bring this up because on the C compilers I've used on the 68000, "int"
>has always been a 32-bit quantity.  This is almost a necessity, because
>of the well-known bad habit of assuming that a pointer will fit in an int.

"Almost".  I worked on a 68000-based machine that had a C
implementation 16-bit "int"s and 32-bit pointers; I didn't find it
particularly painful to use, except when I had to fix other people's
code to be type-correct (and I knew enough to blame *that* on the
other people who wrote that code, not on the C implementation).

>But 32-bit ints on the 68000 are nowhere near as efficient as 16-bit ints.
>They require twice as many memory accesses, and multiplication and division
>have to be performed with subroutines.  This latter point can turn a simple
>subscripting operation into a performance catastrophe.

Nope.  Multiplication by a constant can be done in-line, with a
sequence of shifts and adds, and the most common type of
multiplication in subscripting operations is multiplication by a
constant.