On 05/06/2013 12:11 PM, 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 Am I 'out of date' and 'out of touch'?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 ?? Depends. What is the size of void* ? > Should C and C++ compilers be re-defining shorts, ints and longs? No. It's part of the system ABI. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing#64-bit_data_models Andrew.
