Damien Neil wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 27, 2000 at 10:46:03AM -0500, Philip Newton wrote:
> > So a native int could be 8 bits big? I think that's allowed according to
> > ANSI.
>
> ANSI/ISO C states:
> char <= short <= int <= long
>
> char >= 8 bits
> short >= 16 bits
> int >= 16 bits
> long >= 32 bits
I don't recall the bit sizes to be in ANSI C. Which paragraph is that
in?
Even so, the fact that a standard may declare it, doesn't make it true.
I would expect embedded targets to differ from this.
> C99 adds "long long", which is >= long, and is at least 64 bits large.
>
> I'd be in favor of defining Perl's "native int" type to be at least
> 32 bits long. I would recommend against using the compiler's default
> int type in all cases, as there are compilers which define int as 16
> bits for backwards compatability reasons. (As opposed to 16 bits being
> the native word size of the architecture.)
That's eskewing efficiency to make sensible minimum guarantees. I'd
personally rather see the C compiler's native types be used, because
that's what the platform can do _efficiently_. Using larger types than
that harms perl's ability to perform well on small platforms.
Hildo
