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C’s type naming had real value when it was first designed, at a time when the industry hadn’t yet fully standardised on the 8-bit byte, 32/64-bit words, IEEE floating point, etc. The fact that “int” could be 16-bits on a PDP-11, 32 on an IBM 370, 36 on a PDP-10 or Honeywell 6000 - that was a real aid for portability in those days. But nowadays, that’s really historical baggage that causes more problems than it solves, yet we are stuck with it. I think if one was designing C today, one would probably use something like i8,i16,i32,i64,u8,u16,u32,u64,f32,f64,etc instead. When I write C code, I use stdint.h a lot. I think that’s the best option. |