Re: 64-bit integers in Ada

[Fraser Wilson <newsfraser@blancolioni.org>]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:

> Its been a while since I've seen a C compiler for a 6502, but my
> recollection is that the last one I did look at had 16 bits for the type
> int. Please correct me if I'm wrong here - have you seen C compilers for
> this target using 8 bits for the type int?

No, but Ada has a special problem on 8 bit targets -- the string type.
It's obvious that Integer should be 16 bits, but it's also obvious
that using a two byte string index is overkill; one unsigned byte is
plenty.  I'm vaguely planning some compiler trickery, but it feels
bad.  Is that the normal solution to this issue?  Indexing with two
bytes takes about ten times longer than one byte.

Actually, I don't know that a C compiler could do anything at all
about this, since there's no special string type for which index
finangling could be used.  It would be up to the programmer to address
with an int8.

Fraser.