What breaks? (was Re: 64 bit longs?)

[john c chu]

In article <1991Jan13.220958.16568 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

[model deleted]
>It is intuitively appealing, but I would be surprised to see anyone
>implementing it:  it would break far too much badly-written software.

Can someone please tell me what would break under that model and why?
It's not that I don't believe it, or that I want to write code that
will break. It's that I want to avoid making the unwarranted
assumptions that would lead to my code breaking.

Reply via E-mail unless this is of general interest. (I have no idea.)

					john
				chu at autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu