Re: Integers on 64-bit machines

Denis Washington <dwashington@xxxxxxx> writes:
I'm currently developing a little C-like programming language as a
hobby project. After having implemented the basic integral integer
types like known from Java/C# (with fixed sizes for each type), I
thought a bit about 64-bit machines and wanted to ask: if you develop
on a 64-bit machine, would it be preferable to still leave the
standard integer type ("int") 32-bit, or would it be better to have
"int" grow to 64 bit? In this case, I could have an
architecture-dependent "int" type along with fixed-sized types like
"int8", "int16", "int32" etc.

For a C-like language (i.e., where integers have some connection to
pointers, e.g., pointer arithmetic), the main integer type should have
the same size as a pointer; for your 64-bit machines, it should be 64
bits.

As for having a zoo of integer types like C, that's a bad idea in my
experience. It causes lots of portability bugs; in contrast, in Forth
there's one dominant integer type, the cell, which can also contain an
address; in Forth portability bugs between 32-bit and 64-bit systems,
and between different byte orders are very rare.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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