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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: Prevalence of Compilers for Which Integer'Size < 32?
Date: 1996/07/29
Message-ID: <DvB4oK.MB1@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 170842429
references: <dmarshalDv4vLI.D6E@netcom.com> <dmarshalDv8t9y.Bq8@netcom.com>
 <Dv9JAE.D23@world.std.com> <dewar.838610210@schonberg>
organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-29T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <dewar.838610210@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>because it is much easier to see that 86_400 is bigger than 32767 than
>it is to see that 60*60*24 is bigger than 2**15-1 :-)

Good point.  But in another post in this thread, it would have been
pretty easy to see that 2**31-1 is bigger than 2**15-1.

I refuse to memorize the decimal value of 2**31 -- it's a waste a of
brain cells.  I just know that it's a little over 2 billion (for the
U.S. meaning of "billion"), and that's enough.

I've seen a lot of Ada code that uses giant literals, when a static
expression like 2**31-1 or whatever would have been more readable.  E.g.
I've seen:

    X: constant := 2_147_883_648; -- 2**31

Never use a comment when you can say it in the language proper.

I've also seen things like:

    X: Integer := 100000000; -- ten million

where the programmer apparently didn't realize that underscores are
allowed, and make things more readable.  And I've even seen bugs (as in
the above) because the number of zeros was miscounted.

- Bob