On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, John J. Trammell wrote: > - Software should be developed with an eye on its boundary conditions, e.g. > "I am using a 16-bit int for this field, so we had better not have more than > about 65,000 different planes in the air...". I have personally come to the opinion that the main use of having more than one type of integer is to allow the programmer to pick the wrong one. Using only a single word, or a partial-word, to represent an integer is an *optimization*, not a data type consideration. Having the programmer pick what word size to hold the integer in is a fraught with potiential bugs and portability problems as having the programmer pick what register to hold the integer in. This isn't just about the Y2038 bug- although that's an example. It's about the whole C99 long long fiasco. It's about the 32-bit limit that Java's starting to hit hard- Java used int's to index arrays, so you can't have an array with more than 2^31 elements. Etc. Brian