[EMAIL PROTECTED] (James Youngman) writes:
> Am I mistaken, or is it the case that the C99 standard allows size_t
> to be wider than unsigned long?
You are not mistaken. However, for gnulib the GNU coding standards
trump that. They say:
... don't make any effort to cater to the possibility that
'long' will be smaller than predefined types like 'size_t'.
For example, the following code is ok:
printf ("size = %lu\n", (unsigned long) sizeof array);
printf ("diff = %ld\n", (long) (pointer2 - pointer1));
1989 Standard C requires this to work, and we know of only one
counterexample: 64-bit programs on Microsoft Windows IA-64. We will
leave it to those who want to port GNU programs to that environment
to figure out how to do it.
Predefined file-size types like 'off_t' are an exception: they are
longer than 'long' on many platforms, so code like the above won't
work with them. One way to print an 'off_t' value portably is to
print its digits yourself, one by one.
POSIX 1003.1-2001 also requires support for the assumption that size_t
is no wider than long int (sorry, can't cite chapter and verse
offhand).
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