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A comment on Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972). Parent comment

Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by bregma on Thursday March 11, 2021 @06:55AM (#26423063)
"long" and "short" are adjectives in C. The types are "long int" and "short int" and the "int" is implied if it's not present. A declaration like

    auto long sum;
Declares a variable named "sum" of type "long int" and of automatic storage duration.

The "double" comes from double-precision floating point. In the 1970s and 1980s anyone who came near a computer would know what that meant. Anyone who ever had to use a log table or slide rule (which was anyone doing math professionally) would know exactly what that meant.

There are good sound reasons for the well-chosen keywords. Just because one is ignorant of those reasons does not mean they were not good choices.

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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by _kst_ on Thursday March 11, 2021 @12:31PM (#26426618)
Well, you can certainly think of "long" and "short" as adjectives, but the grammar doesn't treat them that way.

"long", "short", "signed", "unsigned", "int", "float", and "double" are all type specifiers. The language specification includes an exhaustive list of the valid combinations of type specifiers, including which ones refer to the same type. The specifiers can legally appear in an order. For example, "short", "signed short", and "int short signed", among others, all refer to the same type. (They're referred to as "multisets" because "long" and "long long" are distinct.)

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