64 bit ints

Marc Guyott mguyott at mirror.TMC.COM
Tue Nov 1 05:07:05 AEST 1988


In article <225800084 at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>
>>Suppose I am designing a C compiler for a machine with 64bit
>>words.
>>pointers will be.
>
>>How long should an "int" be (32 or 64)? 
>>How about a "short int" (16/32)?
>>How is this decision altered if partial word accesses 
>>are more expensive than full word accesses?
>>
>The answer here should be very clear:
>     Make the compiler so that it can handle the general case of
>           int        32 bits

Didn't K&R define an "int" as being the natural word size of the hardware
that you are running on?  So for an 80286 an int should be 16 bits, for a
machine with a 32 bit word an int should be 32 bits, and for the machine
described above an int should be 64 bits.  Comments?
                                                     Marc
----
       ... I never saw the morning until I stayed up all night ...
                               Tom Waits

Marc Guyott                                         mguyott at mirror.TMC.COM
{mit-eddie, pyramid, harvard!wjh12, xait, datacube}!mirror!mguyott
Mirror Systems	Cambridge, MA  02140                617/661-0777



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list