Word types..._(re)

Fri, 20 Jun 1997 16:07:26 +0100 (BST)

On Fri, 20 Jun 1997 15:49:30 +0200 Frank Heckenbach  
wrote:
>
>The African Chief wrote:
>
>> long			longint  {now = integer}
>> unsigned long		longword  {now = word}
>
>The problem with this one is that (at least on the common platforms),
>"long" is the same as "int", and I'd expect (as probably many ex-BP
>programmers do) LongInt to be longer than Integer. In fact, some of my
>programs rely on this.

Yes. But in BP, "integer" is 16-bit and "longint" is 32-bit.
Surely, if your programs rely on "longint" to be bigger than
"integer", they also expect "integer" to be 16-bit? If GCC's
"long" is 32-bit and GPC's "longint" is 64-bit  - what does that
say about compatibility of data structures?

>
>> long long			comp  {now = longint, or comp}
>> unsigned long long		compword (now = longword}
>
>Why "Comp"? What does "Comp" mean at all? -- I really don't know,
>perhaps I could look it up in one of the 11 BP books... :-|
>
>However, I don't think "Comp" is reasonable name for any integer
>type, except for BP compatibility ("Comp" = "compatibility type" ;-).

This is from the BPW help file;

"Note: The comp type is a 64-bit integer. It holds only integral 
values within the range (-2 63 + 1) to (2 63 - 1)."

>> However, since the above will most likely break a lot of existing
>> code, perhaps GPC should have built-in data types that mean
>> *exactly* the same thing as they mean in GCC
>
>Seems necessary. (I didn't like how C messed up their integer types,
>now we're getting the same problems... :-( -- I hope we find a good
>solution finally!)

So do I. The solution may be to predefine these types in GPC;

"int", "short", "long", "uint", "ulong", "ushort", "longlong", 
"dword", etc. 

These could be defined to mean exactly the same thing as they
mean in GCC - thus, there will be no need to "translate" them into 
Pascal.

Best regards, The Chief 
Dr Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief, and the Great Elephant)
Author of:  Chief's Installer Pro v3.60 for Win16 and Win32.
Homepage:  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/African_Chief/
E-mail: laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk


The African Chief (laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk)