In thinking about char, short, int, long, long long, it appears that int is an exception. It was supposed to be the natural machine word. Plan 9 uses int, as stated earlier, mostly in loop counters and such things. In that case making int be 64 bits on 64 bit machines would make sense only if loading and storing 64 bits was the just as fast at 32 bits. I don't think I need 64 bits to count to 1000.
My main point here is that types describe various sizes of intergers available in a machine. If the machine can do four sizes of integers, then C needs four types to specify them. Brantley
