JimJoyce wrote:
When Dennis Ritchie invented the C Programming language, he suggested that a
short int would normally occupy 2 bytes, and a long int would take 4 bytes,
and no matter what the hardware, a long should always be longer than a
short. That makes sense.
However, he was less precise about the simple int. He simply stated that it
should reflect the 'natural' size of the hardware. So it might be like a
short on one machine, while like a long on another.
Am I 'out of date' and 'out of touch'?
Machines and compilers have grown in size since Ritchie's day
When I check sizeof(short), sizeof(int) and sizeof(long) on my machine I get
2, 2, 4.
Yet my machine is a 64bit one. Is that its 'natural' size. Should not my int
be 8 bytes ??
Should C and C++ compilers be re-defining shorts, ints and longs?
IMHO, this is an interesting question
Your machine is a "64bit" one ! But you're telling about the processor or the operating system ?
Most of the time, when someone say something about choosing between a 64 or 32 bits OS, what he has
in his mind isn't the wide of the data, but the size of the memory address space the OS is able to
handle.
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