Re: A thought on portability...

[Nelson Minar]

Hey folks, sorry I missed out on the shindig. I hope you all had chile
rellenos for me.

We talked about the 
  typedef unsigned short   unsigned32;
  typedef          short   int32;     
  typedef double           ieee64;
thing back when we started Swarm. It's not such a bad idea on the face
of it. But, well, it's unaesthetic - it's not really C code, it's
trying to make C do something that it just doesn't do. In my
experience systems that do this don't work very well.

OTOH, it's really nice to know exactly how big your datatypes are,
*especially* when doing simulation. I really like the fact that Java
makes guarantees, even if the Alpha folks hate it because it means
their fancy 64 bit processors aren't good for much.

Overall, I think there's really no good answer for this.