On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Rodrigo Madera
IMO, on a 64-bit CPU int should be 64 bits, and long should be 128
I agree that such a type should be available. Maybe not all ints directly, but have a word_t for that purpose.
People may argue that "it's not needed" or redundant or whatever, but having the register width as a type could be really useful sometimes.
As the original message said, int is supposed to be the type that matches the CPU register size. The semantics of the C/C++ expressions have been carefully designed for that purpose of int. For example, adding 2 shorts in C/C++ produces an int (not a short), because a typical CPU works most efficiently with full registers (in fact it may not even have "half registers".) With int being 32-bit on a 64-bit CPU, a C compiler is forced to generate code that works with half registers, which would have been inefficient had most 64-bit CPUs not been designed with this in mind. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode