🚀 go-pugleaf

>                        And then there are the sloppy programmers, the
> ones who assume (as you mention) that pointers and ints are the same size,
> or that ints are 32 bits, or that ints and longs are the same size and can
> be used interchangeably (this is depressingly common in the Unix world today,
> and last I looked, both Berkeley and AT&T were aiding and abetting this
> disgusting practice).  Alas, one cannot just ignore the sloppy programmers;
> sometimes one wants to run code they wrote without having to clean it up.
> -- 
> Henry Spencer 
> ----------

This is a problem with poor language design, not sloppy programming.  C
provides no means for a programmer to express the intended range of an
integer.  The X Window System, for example, defines many integer subtypes:
INT16, INT32, UINT16, etc.  The short-int-long difficulties are isolated with
typedefs, but problems still linger.  36-bit architectures, for instance, are
a major headache.  On page 182 of the first edition of "The C Programming
Language," Kernighan and Ritchie summarize the characteristics of several
implementations of C:

                DEC PDP-11  Honeywell   IBM 370     Interdata
                            6000                    8/32

                ASCII       ASCII       EBCDIC      ASCII
    char        8 bits      9 bits      8 bits      8 bits
    int         16          36          32          32
    short       16          36          16          16
    long        32          36          32          32
    float       32          36          32          32
    double      64          72          64          64

When 64-bit machines are the rave, will short-int-long refer to 16-32-64 bit
integers?  Or 32-64-64?  Or 36-36-36  :-?  The programmer needs more control
than provided by C.
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jaa