I've seen 64-bit ints (on Cray systems). One disadvantage of making int 64 bits, even if that's the natural size, is that if char is 8 bits, then short has to

I've seen 64-bit ints (on Cray systems). One disadvantage of making int 64 bits, even if that's the natural size, is that if char is 8 bits, then short has to be either 16 or 32 bits (or 64) -- which means that you can't have predefined types covering all the common sizes (8, 16, 32, 64). That's not quite true, since C99 introduced extended integer types -- but I don't know of any C compiler that has provided them. (The intN_t and uintN_t types in <stdint.h> don't solve this; they still have to be defined in terms of existing types.)