long long integer types

[uunet!cup.portal.com!pls]

The original piece that David Hough posted is, IMHO, one of the clearest
examples of VAX-centric thinking I've ever seen.  

As I've previously commently, in the past few years I've programmed on 
machines where ints were 16, 18, 32, 36, and 64 bits. If I have to write
portable code over this set, I usually sweat a lot.

I think this problem does need to be solved. I'm less certain that it is
within the charter of nceg to solve it.

I do think, very strongly, that there is no acceptable solution in terms of
short, int, long, &c. The only permanent solution is to specify either
range or number of bits in the declaration and let the compiler pick the type
accordingly.

It may be obnoxious to say this to a bunch of C programmers, but Pascal and
Fortran 90 have shown us the way. We should follow in their footsteps.

    ++PLS