[fpc-pascal] History of the Cardinal data type?

Dmitry Boyarintsev skalogryz.lists at gmail.com
Wed Mar 30 03:24:13 CEST 2016


On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 9:06 PM, Graeme Geldenhuys <
mailinglists at geldenhuys.co.uk> wrote:

> So I definitely see the benefit in using (U)Int<xx> style data types.
> They are a lot more obvious [to the programmer] regarding data ranges
> and byte size.
>

Does, it also make the code less high-level?
Didn't high level use the platform independent notation such as "int" or
"word" to be portable across different platforms back in 60s 70s?
At that time word size might vary dramatically from system to system   (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture) )
Thus a code written like this:
  a: Int32;
would not be portable, since it requires a target platform to support
32-bit word (or at least the compiler had to be smart enough).

The modern generation of developers doesn't really have to deal with that
too much, due to dominance of 32-bit (as well as virtual machines, such as
java and/or .net).
But jump to 64-bit still caused a bit of confusion (in C/C++ and object
pascal). with type names and sizes.

thanks,
Dmitry
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