I just ran into a fun little thing I thought I ought to share with people. I am writing a program for calculating the standardised mortality rates from various diseases, when I noticed that an unsigned int as well as an unsigned long on 32-bit x86 architectures is simply not big enough.
On x86_32, both are 4 octets wide, while on x86_64, only int is 4 octets wide. That means they can store values up to 2**32-1 which is about 4.3 billion which is NOT ENOUGH if you want to calculate world-wide statistics! And there I was, foolishly believing that unsigned int so BIG, that I will never in my life really have to worry about its size. Oh, what a fool I was. -- Fourth law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi sendmail: segmentation violation - core dumped -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
