Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!mirror!mguyott
From: mguyott@mirror.TMC.COM (Marc Guyott)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: 64 bit ints
Message-ID: <19175@mirror.TMC.COM>
Date: 31 Oct 88 19:07:05 GMT
Article-I.D.: mirror.19175
References: <6264@june.cs.washington.edu> <225800084@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: mguyott@prism.TMC.COM (Marc Guyott)
Organization: Mirror Systems, Cambridge Mass.
Lines: 27

In article <225800084@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>
>>Suppose I am designing a C compiler for a machine with 64bit
>>words.
>>pointers will be.
>
>>How long should an "int" be (32 or 64)? 
>>How about a "short int" (16/32)?
>>How is this decision altered if partial word accesses 
>>are more expensive than full word accesses?
>>
>The answer here should be very clear:
>     Make the compiler so that it can handle the general case of
>           int        32 bits

Didn't K&R define an "int" as being the natural word size of the hardware
that you are running on?  So for an 80286 an int should be 16 bits, for a
machine with a 32 bit word an int should be 32 bits, and for the machine
described above an int should be 64 bits.  Comments?
                                                     Marc
----
       ... I never saw the morning until I stayed up all night ...
                               Tom Waits

Marc Guyott                                         mguyott@mirror.TMC.COM
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