David Nadlinger wrote:
On 2/17/11 8:56 AM, Denis Koroskin wrote:
I second that. word/uword are shorter than ssize_t/size_t and more in
line with other type names.
I like it.
I agree that size_t/ptrdiff_t are misnomers and I'd love to kill them
with fire, but when I read about »word«, I intuitively associated it
with »two bytes« first – blame Intel or whoever else, but the potential
for confusion is definitely not negligible.
David
Me too. A word is two bytes. Any other definition seems to be pretty
useless.
The whole concept of "machine word" seems very archaic and incorrect to
me anyway. It assumes that the data registers and address registers are
the same size, which is very often not true.
For example, on an 8-bit machine (eg, 6502 or Z80), the accumulator was
only 8 bits, yet size_t was definitely 16 bits.
It's quite plausible that at some time in the future we'll get a machine
with 128-bit registers and data bus, but retaining the 64 bit address
bus. So we could get a size_t which is smaller than the machine word.
In summary: size_t is not the machine word.
