Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!rws
From: rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X11R3 user reports back
Message-ID: <8811161341.AA27446@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 16 Nov 88 13:41:15 GMT
References: <155@sunquest.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23


    I noticed that you broke some of my code by making Position into
    a short from an int... That's ok, it's probably my own fault
    for not using Position instead of int...

I'm glad you see it that way :-)

    But why is it that
    (x,y) coordinates in Xlib are still defined as ints!?  i.e.
    why save space in Xt if you just give it up again in Xlib and
    in the server?

We aren't giving up space elsewhere.  Xt actually stores these
values in widget structures, and when you begin to have a few
thousand widgets, the savings of changing from int to short
become significant.  Typical server implementations have since
the beginning stored these values as shorts.  Xlib almost never
stores anything internally, but structure components that
mirror the protocol are typically defined as shorts.  Arguments
to Xlib functions are uniformly(?) declared as ints (or longs
when need be) just for consistency; when they get packed into
a protocol request, they still get truncated to 16-bits if that's
what the protocol wants.