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

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1991Jan21.025706.7152 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <14896 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) 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.

I don't agree that a machine whose integer types all have sizes different
from 32 bits is "broken".  I've implemented programs that had similar data
packing requirements on architectures that didn't match the packing
boundaries; it's a solvable problem, although one has to take more care
than most hackers feel they can be bothered with.