`Word' data type_(re)

Sat, 14 Jun 1997 13:19:45 +0200 (MET DST)

According to Orlando Llanes:
> 
> [...] On certain computers,
> like the Macintosh I believe, a Byte is the size of a PC Word.

You mean: 16 bits?  One "Byte"?  At least this is against all
definitions I ever saw in textbooks.

> I think that there should be a compiler directive to generate code, [...]

It would not be difficult to implement a compiler switch (*$16-bit *) (or
a command-line option `--16-bit') to make `Integer' and `Word' 16 bits etc.,
but I am not so sure that this is a good idea since GPC is a true 32-bit
compiler.  If we want to look out for a different "natural" data size for
GPC, it should not be 16 bits, but 64 bits!

    Peter

 Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer
peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201]
 maintainer GNU Pascal [970510] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]

Peter Gerwinski (peter@agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de)