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On Monday 13 May 2002 7:33 pm, you wrote:
> The
> distinction between int, long, and short, for example, made perfect sense
> in a world where 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit machines were all commonplace.
> It is now rather quaint for most of us, and will be a bizarre anachronism
> in 10 years or so (when I assume that even cellphones will use 64-bit
> processors).
<pearls of wisdom>
The solution to the 'future proofing integer sizes' problem taken by ASN.1 is
to have an integer type which is unbounded and a facility to constrain it
with arbitrary minima and maxima.
I was pleased to read this since for years I'd been designing programming
languages with 'ranged integers' as a way to get around the fact that a C int
is not a portable type since its properties vary depending on the underlying
architecture, hack spit, while languages like Java defined int as 32 bits at
the cost of being doomed to encounter quirks when everything's 64 bit. Not
sure what Java's like on a 64 bit platform, but I'll be very disappointed if
it makes ints 64 bits long...
</pearls of wisdom>
ABS
--
Alaric B. Snell
http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/
Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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