Dave Gotwisner wrote:
Using your example, if you had a 8, 16, 64, and 128 bit native types, and you wanted an EXACTLY 32 bit type, how would it work? Given ANSI only specifies char, short, long, and long long, when we support 256 bit native types, and you still need the smaller ones (or everything written to date will break), how would you get the fifth type?
You wouldn't, and your application would fail to build because it's not compatible with that architecture -- which IMO is a better situation than it building just fine (because you used "long") and failing at runtime because the code expected a particular length and got something different. If the failure is in an infrequently-used part of the code you might not discover it until pretty far down the road. Using typedefs gives you fail-fast behavior on systems that can't support the required types.
I have worked on projects where different people are familiar with different type conventions, so the code is written with two or more of the various typedefs, based upon who touches the code when. Note that this is for commercial products not open source, with formal review processes, etc.
Me too, and I'm not defending that practice! If anyone sees redundancy like that in libevent, it should be stamped out immediately. But the fact that word-length typedefs can be used poorly isn't a reason to not use them at all; they do serve a useful purpose in some cases.
-Steve _______________________________________________ Libevent-users mailing list Libevent-users@monkey.org http://monkey.org/mailman/listinfo/libevent-users
