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From: daveb@geac.UUCP (Dave Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Supercomputer Unix decisions
Message-ID: <743@geac.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 10:37:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: geac.743
Posted: Tue Jun  9 10:37:55 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jun-87 01:00:42 EDT
References: <3659@spool.WISC.EDU>
Reply-To: daveb@geac.UUCP (Dave Brown)
Organization: GEAC Computers, Toronto, CANADA
Lines: 14
Summary: Or Lisp Machine, or Whatever.

In article <3659@spool.WISC.EDU> lm@cottage.WISC.EDU (Larry McVoy) writes:
>Hi there.  (sorry, pete).  Suppose you were to bring up a Unix on a machine
>that liked 64 bit ints better than 32 bit ints.  Would you be tempted to
>make some of the changes that have already been anticipated - such as making
>the time fields be 64 bits in things like the stat buf and timer structs?
>Or would you leave things alone so that old code worked?

Well, on 36-bit machines the advice of history is to make them 36...
Primarily so that old code worked.  Are you perhaps thinking of both
32 and 64-bit CPUs dealing with the same binaries?  Normally increasing
a word size makes little difference to C compilers & their support
environments, its making them smaller that hurts (try to get AR and DR
into a 32-bit word some time)
 --dave (clarification, svp) brown