Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!gwyn From: gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: integer sizes Message-ID: <8988@brl-tgr.ARPA> Date: Wed, 6-Mar-85 11:05:23 EST Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.8988 Posted: Wed Mar 6 11:05:23 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 8-Mar-85 03:11:02 EST References: <8871@brl-tgr.ARPA> <786@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA> Organization: Ballistic Research Lab Lines: 16 You failed to show the #define for "uint60" on e.g. a VAX. How are you going to port your code to a 32-bit machine? By implementing your very-long-integer data types in a way that does not exceed the guaranteed minimum limits of any ANSI C conforming implementation, you would significantly improve the portability of your code. There are well-known techniques for implementing extended-precision arithmetic (e.g. Knuth Vol. 2); having such routines in the standard library could be useful but forcing the compiler to handle this issue directly is counter to the general flavor of C. If you really want non-portable code (e.g., for reasons of speed), you can still do that too, but there is no reason the C language should be made considerably more elaborate just so you can code in terms of "uint60".