That does not contradict what I said. When choosing the type, all you need is a type that has at least the range you require, and the basic types give guarante

That does not contradict what I said. When choosing the type, all you need is a type that has at least the range you require, and the basic types give guaranteed minimum ranges. The only advantage to choosing an exactly-N-bit type over an at-least-N-bit type is possibly saving some space in very large allocations. In most cases this won't be important - and when it is, the mininmum-width types from stdint.h (eg int_least32_t) are more apropos than the exact-width types. The disadvantage is the impedance mis-match with all the existing libraries of code using the basic types.