Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972)
by skissane on Thursday March 11, 2021 @01:47PM
(#26427497)
C’s type naming had real value when it was first designed, at a time when the industry hadn’t yet fully standardised on the 8-bit byte, 32/64-bit words, IEEE floating point, etc.
The fact that “int” could be 16-bits on a PDP-11, 32 on an IBM 370, 36 on a PDP-10 or Honeywell 6000 - that was a real aid for portability in those days.
But nowadays, that’s really historical baggage that causes more problems than it solves, yet we are stuck with it. I think if one was designing C today, one would probably use something like i8,i16,i32,i64,u8,u16,u32,u64,f32,f64,etc instead.
When I write C code, I use stdint.h a lot. I think that’s the best option.
The fact that “int” could be 16-bits on a PDP-11, 32 on an IBM 370, 36 on a PDP-10 or Honeywell 6000 - that was a real aid for portability in those days.
But nowadays, that’s really historical baggage that causes more problems than it solves, yet we are stuck with it. I think if one was designing C today, one would probably use something like i8,i16,i32,i64,u8,u16,u32,u64,f32,f64,etc instead.
When I write C code, I use stdint.h a lot. I think that’s the best option.