On Monday 18 April 2005 07:22, Marco van de Voort wrote: > > On Sunday 17 April 2005 10:45, Ales Katona wrote: > > > First of all Integer should be size independent, that is, xy bits > > > depending on the platform. > > > > I second that. > > It is now. It just happens to be the same.
:) Ok, good point. > > > Second, we should "force people in a friendly way" to use more > > > readible names like: > > > sint32, uint64, etc. than "cardinal" > > > > No. Such stuff is only needed when you do hardware-interfacing. > > And that's the _only_ reason someone would need types with defined > > bit-sizes. > > That's a bit simplistic; Network/system interfacing, binary > fileformats ? Oh sorry, in that context, I'd call that "hardware", too. It belongs to the "outside world's" interface. > > > In a few years when 64 bits are normal, what will cardinal > > > become? who knows.. > > > > That's why Pascal has range types. Define the range you need, and > > don't use "just some type" which has the range you think you will > > need. > > I actually tried this in a major app at work. Well, and I actually do this in a major app at work. Not on everything, of course, but it can heavily simplify some stuff, for instance because I can use the Low and High-attribu^Wfunctions on the type which is safer than using constants, because the compiler can do the work for me. > In theory it is nice Well, in practice it works. :-) > However quite a lot of datastructures get written to disc sooner and > later, and to get fileformats size independant, you need a lot of > datastructure conversions (from records with fields that have arch > dependant size to packed records with fields with fixed sized integer > types). Yes, of course, that's the outside world. For instance, I have to read Image-files (and if you know TIFF, you know the beast) and have to write binary structures to a connected embedded system and there I badly need known size types, but that's about it. Maybe, you have to do such things more often, but - no offense meant - earlier experience led me to believe that binary file formats are evil. They tend to change too often, they tend to use types that don't even survive half a decade, and even if this doesn't matter known size types won't save you from the Hell of Endianess. And if you don't have that problem, you don't have it all. ;-) Vinzent. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel