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

[David Tanguay]

In article <1991Jan21.025706.7152 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
|>>There is no portable way to declare a type with *exactly* 32 bits, ...
|>And there is no guarantee that such a type even exists...
|In that case, that machine is going to have real trouble declaring, say,
|a TCP header structure.  It is always possible to find machines so badly
|broken that you can't cope with them.

What about 36 bit machines? Or did you really mean "at least" 32 bits,
and not "exactly"? If the TCP software requires an (non-bitfield) integral
type of exactly 32 bits then it is the TCP software that is broken.
There should be no problem with slop bits in the internal representation
of the structure.
-- 
David Tanguay            Software Development Group, University of Waterloo