Hey, brianwski the author here, unfortunately I didn't realize my (2008) web page was on Hacker News until somebody told me. :-) Anyway, in my old age I feel

Hey, brianwski the author here, unfortunately I didn't realize my (2008) web page was on Hacker News until somebody told me. :-) Anyway, in my old age I feel that the "ambiguous size types" in 'C' are outright evil. Size is REALLY important, it's not like you can just declare an "int" and know in your heart it is "big enough", you need to absolutely be sure that the values you put in it will fit. So I like using explicitly sized integers in all situations, why not? The ONLY argument I can fathom for "let the compiler decide on this integer's size" is performance, and frankly if that is your performance problem (and not disk I/O) then you need to be focusing on that problem WAAAAAAY more than just letting the compiler decide how big your integer is.