On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 11:27:10 -0500, dman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip] > When you say that, in C, something is an 'int', is it possible to have > a bit pattern there that is not a valid 'int'? No. 'int' describes > the set of all valid values and every possible bit pattern you can > stick there is a valid int. In many cases when you write 'int' in > your code (for example the java.util.Vector.getElement() method) you > don't really want all the valid values that 'int' describes, but > merely a subset of them (0<=i<length). The problem is that today's > programming languages don't provide a mechanism to express this so > programmers approximate it with types that describe supersets of the > set they want. (this explains why I dislike java and its type system > so much; for C it is acceptable because C excels at the low-level > problems it was intended to solve)
FYI: There are modern languages where you can define limimited range numerical types. Ada is one such language: type Tri_State is range 0 .. 2; or subtype Tri_State is Integer range 0 .. 2; -- Eric G. Miller <egm2@jps.net>
