On 05/06/2013 08:01 AM, Jose-Marcio Martins wrote:
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Am I 'out of date' and 'out of touch'?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.
There are 64-bit hardware platforms where int is 4 bytes in 32-bit mode,
and 8 bytes in 64-bit mode, becoming less common AFAIK.
More common is a long int of 4 bytes for 32-bit mode, 8 bytes for 64-bit
mode.
Most such platforms have 4-byte pointers in 32-bit mode, 8-byte in
64-bit mode.
8- and 16-bit platforms typically had 2-byte int and pointer, but I
never saw such a thing on a 32- or 64-bit platform.
Do you mean a 16-bit platform with support for 64-bit data types? I did
work on such, 30 years ago, but it didn't have a C compiler.
--
Tim Prince
