>It seems to make code less portable Than what? Than a freshly designed C-like language? Yes. But ISO C wasn't an effort to invent a new language. It was an ef

>It seems to make code less portable Than what? Than a freshly designed C-like language? Yes. But ISO C wasn't an effort to invent a new language. It was an effort to standardize existing practice, and provide a platform for improving C. One of the core goals of ISO C is to maintain every last bit of backward compatibility possible, which is why integer widths are not precisely specified: had they been, multiple vendors' implementations and the code that was written for them would have broken. But to your main point, I agree: explicitly sized integer types are almost always what you should use. For example, don't store a pointer in an unsigned long (and certainly not a signed long); store it in a uintptr_t, or hell, just store it as a pointer. In fact, the fundamental types like int, long, etc. are effectively just shorthand for int_fast16_t, int_fast32_t, etc., but without the mnemonic value.