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From: lm@cottage.WISC.EDU (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: pointer alignment when int != char *
Message-ID: <3817@spool.WISC.EDU>
Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 11:36:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: spool.3817
Posted: Mon Jul  6 11:36:03 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 7-Jul-87 03:28:16 EDT
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Reply-To: lm@cottage.WISC.EDU (Larry McVoy)
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Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:2857 comp.unix.wizards:3130

I sez:
  I'm not sure this is true anymore.  Don't some supercomputers make
  longs 32 bits, long longs 64 bits, and have addresses > 32 bits and < 64 bits?
  I seem to remember that someone said something like that recently.

Doug sez:
  What's a (long long)?  We were talking about portable code!

A long long is a kludge.  However, I seem to remember that it went something
like this:  a company was doing unix on a Amdahl (???) and the unix people
were really used to (xxx *) == 32 bits and (long) == 32 bits, and having
it otherwise broke all sorts of code.  So they gave people short, int, long,
and long long.  Yeah, it's gross.  But so was defining C in such an 
ambiguous way.   It's really time for int8 int16 int32 int64 or some such
attempt at defining sizes with the type.

Larry McVoy 	        lm@cottage.wisc.edu  or  uwvax!mcvoy