Brian Guralnick wrote:
Using a 16 bit integer to count votes where voters can be above 65k? What kind of intelligence created this system today where they really, really, really needed to save the 2 whole bytes?
Brian you are sorely out of touch with the reality of today's programmers that are recent college grads. Most of them would not know what you are talking about. The latest trends in programming have removed the program from the hardware. The programmer does not need to know anything about the hardware including how wide a particular variable is. As a result most of them don't know.
I bet the problem here is programmers that have always declared variables as "int" and since it has always worked for them, they have never bothered to learn anything more. Now, they are working on a different system, most probably on an embedded processor, rather than a full blown Pentium PC. The new system has a different compiler, one that declares an "int" as 16 bits rather than 32 bits. The programmers have no clue that this happened, they have no idea what this means and not enough insight to figure out what is going on. I bet that for most of them, the values 32,767 and 65,535 have no special meaning. For the non-programmers in the audience, those are the largest values that can be represented in 16 bits using signed and unsigned math respectively.
That is the sad reality of education in the USA today. When you water down your education to the level of the dumbest person, everyone starts functioning at that level. And then we wonder why here in the USA we are loosing our high tech jobs to countries that have a real education system, rather than a feel good one.
Hamid (US college grad from a bygone era)
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