3 ms·
No, the names are fine and self evident after glancing through K&R for 15 min. The real mistake in retrospect is that int and long are platform dependent. This
by bpgate 6y ago
No, the names are fine and self evident after glancing through K&R for 15 min.
The real mistake in retrospect is that int and long are platform dependent. This is an amazing time sink when writing portable programs.
For some reason C programmers looked down on the exact width integer types for a long time.
The base types should have been exact width from the start, and the cool sounding names like int and long should have been typedefs.
In practice, I consider this a larger problem than the often cited NULL.
- jeffrallen 6y agoAnd that creat has no e on the end.
- Koshkin 6y agoIt's a perfectly good word in Romanian.
- flohofwoe 6y agoIt made more sense in an era when computers hadn't settled on 8-bit bytes yet. A better idea (not mine) is to separate the variable type from the storage type. There should be only one integer variable type with the same width as a CPU register (e.g. always 64-bit on today's CPUs), and storage types should be more flexible and explicit (e.g. 8, 16, 32, 64 bits, or even any bit-width).