[benjaminwai]

I kind of sympathize the engineer who had to code this in the first place years ago. I could see it, it was probably a junior person being thrown into it. He would have had to deal with non-standard components, incompatible packages and limited memory, and had a manager breathing down his neck because the manufacturing line was starting up.. He's probably looking up at the clock and thinking that it had enough bits for the foreseeable future.

[throwaway472927]

I'd be a bit surprised if anyone even checked, it's easy to type int out of habit when a number is needed, or even if the dev did consider it the code building and running might be enough reassurance.