shorts vs. ints on a VAX 11/750

[Arthur David Olson]

I noted today that variables in "ex_vis.h" were declared to be type "short"
rather than type "int."  Now my own experience with our VAX 11/750 has been
that it pays to declare (non-array) variables to be "int" rather than "short";
this avoids all sorts of "cvtxx"s at run time, and seems to more than compensate
for the extra memory fetches involved in using "int"s rather than "short"s.
And yet I've got to believe that there was a good reason for using shorts in vi.

If you have insights in to using shorts versus using ints on the VAX 11/750
in general, or shorts versus ints in vi in particular, I'd appreciate hearing
from you.
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