Re: Help with an algorithm

[petah <lua@...>]

>On most platforms these days unsigned long is 64 bits (however, note the "most").

That's a very unhelpful comment even if it were true, but it isn't.

First, the sign hardly matters. Second, a C type's size is set in stone by a /compiler/, not a platform or CPU, as is struct alignment. Apple actually changed type sizes from one OSX version to the next. Whether by "most" you mean PCs and/or cellphones, then "most" define long as 32-bit (VisualC @ x64 or Clang/iOS @ x32). The C standards defines ranges, not fixed sizes. In retrospect is seems a bad idea but at the time there were all sorts of funky CPUs... we're lucky they were all binary. A long does currently occupy 8 bytes on *nix64, "mostly", but one can hardly use that probability as a basis for design.

If you want fixed type sizes include "stdint.h" and use uint32_t, say, but watch those truncation warnings.

Making assumptions about C type sizes or suggesting that eyeballing today's landscape is good enough to draw conclusions is year-2000 type shortsightedness and does a real disservice to portable code... or those who'll have to debug it down the road :)

-- p