Re:When ‘int’ is the new ‘short’
by Someone on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @06:42AM
(#9850814)
For return values of a function it allows overloading, with negative numbers indicating errors.
That's useful if your language lacks the ability to return multiple values from a function. That typically was (probably still is on quite a few architectures) the case for languages designed for speed.
Also, in C, int was implicit (see https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc for example source code). So, using int made your programs shorter. That's important if your multi-user system doesn't have much memory (the first PDP-11 that ran Unix had 24 kilobytes of memory), and if you like concise porgrams, as Ritchie apparently did.
That's useful if your language lacks the ability to return multiple values from a function. That typically was (probably still is on quite a few architectures) the case for languages designed for speed.
Also, in C, int was implicit (see https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc for example source code). So, using int made your programs shorter. That's important if your multi-user system doesn't have much memory (the first PDP-11 that ran Unix had 24 kilobytes of memory), and if you like concise porgrams, as Ritchie apparently did.