It *isn't* "putting every possible feature into every language." Did I ever advocate that?
It's "putting a feature that you already put there, into the language, just no longer arbitrarily selecting certain integer sizes and excluding others." Am I making syntax more complicated? No. I am if anything suggesting making it simpler by removing arbitrary rules that only complicated situation. Am I making compiler more complicated? No, the code to do this was already written (just with different numbers), and by doing what I say the compiler could actually be simplified in some ways. And no, I do not think "saving a life" worth of time is "completely meaningless." And also, it is actually C's explicit mission to be close to the machine, trying basically to provide a user-friendly portable machine-model. Given that is its design mission, it is rather absurd to disallow access to various common machine primitives like multiply-hi&lo, shift with carry, etc. Adding those would in no way complicate the overall language design, it'd just be another builtin function just like the ones you already have put in. If I told you to remove div(a,b) from GCC because it was a fairly silly complication and unnecessary feature, that'd be true, and yet you would tell me I was an idiot. If I tell you to put in mul(a,b): then it is a less-silly, more-useful, thing, which you just (see previous sentence) agreed with me was worthwhile. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
