int divided by unsigned.
Jim Giles
jlg at lanl.gov
Thu Jul 13 10:25:13 AEST 1989
>From article <66203 at yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, by Horne-Scott at cs.yale.edu (Scott Horne):
> [...] You probably don't want to make `int' a three-byte type; thus, make
> it four bytes. (This is consistent with your twice-the-size argument, too.)
> What to do with `long'? Well, you want it to be at least twice the size of
> an `int'. But that's eight bytes--and the machine instructions can't handle
> eight-byte integers conveniently! Heavens above! [...]
Oh, gee ... The language design might not be _convenient_ for some
machines. That means my Smalltalk environment on the PC (with arbitrary
precision integer arithmetic) has done something _inconvenient_. I have
other _compiled_ languages which have 64 bit integers, why can't C?
> Other problems arise, such as alignment. Anyway, your demands force all
> implementations to use 1-byte `char's, 2-byte `short's, and 4-byte `int's.
> Doesn't this seem daft?
No, "daft" isn't the word I'd choose. I might lean toward "portable", or
"well defined", but certainly not "daft".
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