No subject

[uunet!research.att.com!doug]

The supposition that ints in C are 32 bits long is wrong de
facto as well as de jure.  There are lots of 16-bit machines
out there.  It might more convincingly be argued that
longs are 32 bits de facto, but even that is suspect.
(It does not make sense to ignore Cray, especially for NCEG.)

As for "long long", there is a terrible precedent in
Algol 68, where "long long long integer" meant about
as much as 4-cubit integer.  At some point it becomes
better to express your memory needs in standard
units.  As Bob Barton once wisely observed, "In the
beginning was the word, but it wasn't a fixed number 
of bits."

Doug McIlroy
Bell Labs