🚀 go-pugleaf

Lawrence Kirby (fred@genesis.demon.co.uk) wrote:

>These seem rather pointless (other than uint32). sint16 is to all intents and
>purposes equivalent to short. 

I suppose there may (in the future, perhaps) be a compiler on which short is 
more than 16 bits; occasionally you do want something to be exactly n bits.

>schar8 can't be anything other than signed char.

A char is guaranteed to be a byte, large enough to hold a character of the
native character set.  A byte is usually [but not always] 8 bits.
I'm sorry I can't find my K&R at the moment, so someone can correct me if
they like.  (It's on about p32 or earlier, I think.)

I confess I've never used a compiler where a short wasn't 16 bits and a 
char 8; however, the standard does at least leave room for the suggested 
types to be useful.

>To use the language (or at least the standard library) effectively you
>ultimately need to know what the underlying type is. fprintf and fscanf
>conversion specifiers are the most clear example of this.

One solution I've used in the past is to cast to or from a long.  There can 
still be problems with this, though.

pjm.


>By trying to cover
>up the underlying types you are ultimately asking for trouble, especially
>when the basic language itself provides the tools to write portable code.
>To effectively support that sort of usage you need a language with stronger
>typing, such as one derived from PASCAL, or possibly C++'s OO support.