On Feb 2, 2006, at 10:36 PM, Bengt Richter wrote:
So long as we have a distinction between int and long, IWT int will be fixed width for any given implementation, and for interfacing with foreign functions it will continue to be useful at times to limit the type of arguments being passed.
We _don't_ have a distinction in any meaningful way, anymore. ints and longs are almost always treated exactly the same, other than the "L" suffix. I expect that suffix will soon go away as well. If there is code that _doesn't_ treat them the same, there is the bug. We don't need strange new syntax to work around buggy code. Note that 10**14/10**13 is also a long, yet any interface that did not accept that as an argument but did accept "10" is simply buggy. Same goes for code that says it takes a 32-bit bitfield argument but won't accept 0x80000000. James