Re: Integers on 64-bit machines

On Jul 2, 11:43 pm, Denis Washington <dwashing...@gmx.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm currently developing a little C-like programming language as a
> hobby project. After having implemented the basic integral integer
> types like known from Java/C# (with fixed sizes for each type), I
> thought a bit about 64-bit machines and wanted to ask: if you develop
> on a 64-bit machine, would it be preferable to still leave the
> standard integer type ("int") 32-bit, or would it be better to have
> "int" grow to 64 bit? In this case, I could have an
> architecture-dependent "int" type along with fixed-sized types like
> "int8", "int16", "int32" etc.


IMHO for 32-bit architecture upwards I would make "int" to be fixed to
32 bits long for practicality. Then you can have "int8", "int16",
"int32", "int64", "int128", etc.


This is due to the fact that since ANSI C 1989 (ISO C 1990) came out
most C compiler implementations for 32-bit machines for "int" have
been 32 bits for about two decades; and overwhelming number of
applications have been written with that in mind. Although 64-bit
architectures were available at the time, but it was not nearly as
common as 32-bit architectures until recently.


But, finally it's up to you :-)


Regards.


Napi

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