Your laptop I would assume is not an IBM Mainframe <g> No matter how you specify character constants you have to be aware of the character set. My big C++ project was "bi-modal": it ran "production" on z/OS and limited unit test on Windows. I had to be aware of whether I meant 'A" or 0xC1 or 0x41 no matter how I wrote the constant. I often meant "platform-appropriate A," so 'A' was perfect.
One big use I made of multi-character integers was in the context of C++ std::map. I used maps a lot, and if the index were a character value of eight characters or less, then it was (I assumed, and yes, I know about assume ...) more efficient, certainly in terms of storage and probably in terms of CPU time, to have the index be an integer rather than a pointer to a null-terminated string. That is map<int, whatever*> rather than map<char*, whatever*>. I suspect the former generates simple integer compares while the latter generates three loads and a CLST. Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
