On Sun, 2021-11-28 at 14:57 +0100, Jouke Witteveen wrote: > > Since the two arguments are equal, it doesn't matter which of LHS > > or RHS we return. > > They could differ for instance when one of them contains a '+'-sign. > My reason for using LHS is that we already have a string for it.
I don't think that it's necessary return the exact string. If the user wanted a string match they can do that other ways. Returning the "absolute value" (stripping leading +/-, leading 0's, etc.) seems more useful to me. > By using sprintf, we need to make the buffer big enough, which in > turn requires INTSTR_LENGTH to be fitting for whatever width a long > has on the current platform. That's already the case; GNU make defines this constant to be large enough to hold the largest possible (8-byte) integer value, regardless of platform. This is used in various places when showing output etc. > > However, now that I think about it I need to change the code more: we > > need to be using "long long" here not just "long". While on Linux etc. > > a "long" is 8 bytes, on Windows "long" is only 4 bytes. > > I was hoping this would not be necessary, and I cannot think of a > typical use case where make is a good fit for dealing with large > integers. The benefit of "long" is that strtol is more widely > available than strtoll. I see what you mean, but I _really_ don't like the idea of GNU make working differently on different platforms, even if such use cases are rare. I can imagine a situation where, for example, someone wants to compare the sizes of files and if one of the files is >4G then it will work on Linux and fail on Windows.
