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From: Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Build language with weak typing,
 then add scaffolding later to strengthen it?
Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 17:39:41 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2015-05-22T17:39:41+00:00
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On 2015-05-22, kalvin.news@gmail.com <kalvin.news@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My point here is that although an int is an int, an int in one context may be totally different from another int, although both entities are of type int.
>
> For example, a low-level harddisk device driver might contain declarations like this:
>
> int cylinder = 1;
> int head = 2;
> int sector = 3;
>

What I would hope is that the designer uses unsigned integers for those
variables and, in order to make the code portable across platforms, they
used uint32_t and friends to encode within the program what the actual
required size of those variables need to be.

Simon.

PS: This is _not_ a dig at you BTW but an observation on some C code
that I have looked at. I don't like seeing see code use plain integers
when an unsigned integer better models the problem at hand.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world